Hi 


LIBRARY 

OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 


GIFT    OF 


Class        U 


THE  HISTORY  OF  THE  TELEPHONE 


BY  MR.  CASSON 


CYRUS  HALL  McCORMICK:  His  LIFE  AND 
WORK.  With  photogravure  portrait  and  25 
illustrations.  $1.50  net. 

This  is  a  remarkable  life  account  of  the  in- 
ventor of  the  Reaper. 


A.  C.  McCLURG  &  Co.,  Publishers 
CHICAGO 


OF    THE 

UNIVERSITY 

OF 


ALEXANDER    GRAHAM    BELL'S    FIRST    TELEPHONE 


THE  HISTORY  OF  THE 
TELEPHONE 


BY 
HERBERT  N.   CASSON 

AUTHOR    OF 

THE  ROMANCE  OF  STEEL,"    " CYRUS  HALL  McCoRMicx,  His  LIFE 
AND  WORK,"  "THE  ROMANCE  OF  THE  REAPER,"  ETC. 


FULLY  ILLUSTRATED 


CHICAGO 
A.  C.   McCLURG  &  CO, 

1910 


COPYRIGHT 

A.  C.  McCLURG  &  CO. 
1910 

Published  August  27,  1910 


PRESS    OF    THE    VAIL    COMPANY 
COSHOCTON,    U.    S.    A. 


PREFACE 

rpHIRTY-FIVE   short  years,  and  presto! 

A  the  newborn  art  of  telephony  is  fullgrown. 
Three  million  telephones  are  now  scattered 
abroad  in  foreign  countries,  and  seven  millions 
are  massed  here,  in  the  land  of  its  birth. 

So  entirely  has  the  telephone  outgrown  the  ridi- 
cule with  which,  as  many  people  can  well  remem- 
ber, it  was  first  received,  that  it  is  now  in  most 
places  taken  for  granted,  as  though  it  were  a 
part  of  the  natural  phenomena  of  this  planet.  It 
has  so  marvellously  extended  the  facilities  of 
conversation  r—  that  "art  in  which  a  man  has  all 
mankind  for  competitors" —  that  it  is  now  an  in- 
dispensable help  to  whoever  would  live  the  con- 
venient life.  The  disadvantage  of  being  deaf  and 
dumb  to  all  absent  persons,  which  was  universal 
in  pre-telephonic  days,  has  now  happily  been 
overcome ;  and  I  hope  that  this  story  of  how  and 
by  whom  it  was  done  will  be  a  welcome  addition 
to  American  libraries. 


.4061 


PREFACE 

It  is  such  a  story  as  the  telephone  itself  might 
tell,  if  it  could  speak  with  a  voice  of  its  own. 
It  is  not  technical.  It  is  not  statistical.  It  is 
not  exhaustive.  It  is  so  brief,  in  fact,  that  a 
second  volume  could  readily  be  made  by  describ- 
ing the  careers  of  telephone  leaders  whose  names 
I  find  have  been  omitted  unintentionally  from 
this  book  —  such  indispensable  men,  for  instance, 
as  William  R.  Driver,  who  has  signed  more  tele- 
phone cheques  and  larger  ones  than  any  other 
man;  Geo.  S.  Hibbard,  Henry  W.  Pope,  and 
W.  D.  Sargent,  three  veterans  who  know  tele- 
phony in  all  its  phases ;  George  Y.  Wallace,  the 
last  survivor  of  the  Rocky  Mountain  pioneers; 
Jasper  N.  Keller,  of  Texas  and  New  England; 
W.  T.  Gentry,  the  central  figure  of  the  South- 
east, and  the  following  presidents  of  telephone 
companies:  Bernard  E.  Sunny,  of  Chicago;  E. 
B.  Field,  of  Denver;  D.  Leet  Wilson,  of  Pitts- 
burg;  L.  G.  Richardson,  of  Indianapolis;  Caspar 
E.  Yost,  of  Omaha;  James  E.  Caldwell,  of  Nash- 
ville; Thomas  Sherwin,  of  Boston;  Henry  T. 
Scott,  of  San  Francisco;  H.  J.  Pettengill,  of 

Dallas;  Alonzo  Burt,  of  Milwaukee;  John  Kil- 

vi 


PREFACE 

gour,  of  Cincinnati;  and  Chas.  S.  Gleed,  of  Kan- 
sas City. 

I  am  deeply  indebted  to  most  of  these  men  for 
the  information  which  is  herewith  presented; 
and  also  to  such  pioneers,  now  dead,  as  O.  E. 
Madden,  the  first  General  Agent;  Frank  L. 
Pope,  the  noted  electrical  expert;  C.  H.  Haskins, 
of  Milwaukee;  George  F.  Ladd,  of  San  Fran- 
cisco; and  Geo.  F.  Durant,  of  St.  Louis. 

H.  N.  C. 

PINE  HILL,  N,  Y,,  June  1, 1910. 


VII 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I     THE  BIRTH  OF  THE  TELEPHONE      ...  11 

II     THE  BUILDING  OF  THE  BUSINESS      ...  42 

III  THE  HOLDING  OF  THE  BUSINESS       ...  77 

IV  THE  DEVELOPMENT  OF  THE  ART     .      .      .  108 
V     THE  EXPANSION  OF  THE  BUSINESS    .      .      .  170 

VI     NOTABLE  USERS  OF  THE  TELEPHONE     .      .  199 

VII     THE    TELEPHONE    AND    NATIONAL    EFFI- 
CIENCY          220 

VIII     THE  TELEPHONE  IN  FOREIGN  COUNTRIES     .  245 

IX     THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  TELEPHONE  ..      .      .  273 

INDEX                                                                  .  301 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

ALEXANDER  GRAHAM  BELL'S  FIRST  TELEPHONE  Frontispiece 
FIRST  EXCHANGE  SWITCHBOARD  WITH  TWENTY  CIR- 
CUITS, EQUIPPED  IN  1878   .  •  .          .          .20 
FIRST  BELL  TELEPHONES,  PHOTOGRAPHED  FROM  THE 
ORIGINAL   INSTRUMENTS   IN   THE    PATENT    OFFICE 
AT  WASHINGTON        ......        20 

ALEXANDER  GRAHAM  BELL  IN  1876         ...        28 
THOMAS  SANDERS  IN  1878,  AT  THE  TIME  WHEN  HE 

WAS  SOLE  FINANCIAL  BACKER  OF  THE  TELEPHONE       28 
GARDINER  G.  HUBBARD  IN  1876     ....        82 

THOMAS  A.  WATSON  IN  1878  ....        82 

FACSIMILE  OF  CONTEMPORANEOUS  NEWSPAPER  AC- 
COUNT IN  Boston  Advertiser  OF  FIRST  TELEPHONE 
CONVERSATION  ......  48 

THEODORE  N.  VAIL  IN  1878 62 

W.    N.    FORBES,   FIRST   PRESIDENT   OF    BELL    TELE- 
PHONE  COMPANY      ......       74 

CHAUNCEY   SMITH         ......        84 

JAMES  J.  STORROW        ......        90 

THOMAS  D.  LOCKWOOD  .....      102 

J.  J.  CARTY 122 

BROADWAY  AND  JOHN  STREET,  NEW  YORK,  IN  18QO, 

SHOWING  THE  DENSITY  OF  OVERHEAD  WIRES         .      128 
BROADWAY  AND  JOHN  STREET,  NEW  YORK,  AS  IT  AP- 
PEARS WITHOUT  OVERHEAD  WIRES        .          .          .182 
BACK  SECTION  OF  MODERN  SWITCHBOARD        .          .      142 
CHARLES  E.  SCRIBNER,  TO  WHOM  THE  PERFECTION  OF 
THE  SWITCHBOARD  is  LARGELY  DUE  144 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

SECTION  OF  TYPICAL  NEW  YORK  CITY  TELEPHONE 

EXCHANGE        .  .  .  .  .  .  .154 

ENOS  M.  BARTON,  FOR  FORTY  YEARS  THE  HEAD  OF 

THE  WESTERN  ELECTRIC    .  .  .  .  .164 

JOHN  K  HUDSON          .          .          .          .          .          .176 

EDWARD  J.  HALL          .  .  .  .  .  .180 

FREDERICK   P.   FISH      .  .  .  .  .  .188 

DETAILS   OF    LAYING    TELEPHONE    CABLES    IN    NEW 
YORK  STREETS:  BENDING  THREE-INCH  IRON  PIPES 
FOR   38TH   STREET   SUBWAY  —  ROCK    DRILLERS   IN 
TRENCH  .......      202 

OPENING    OF     CHICAGO-NEW     YORK     LONG-DISTANCE 
LINE,  1893,  ALEXANDER  GRAHAM  BELL  AT  TELE- 
PHONE    ........      224 

A  SUBWAY  LAID  WITHOUT  BOTTOM  CONCRETE   .          .      238 
EXTERIOR  OF  NEW  CHINESE  TELEPHONE  EXCHANGE, 
SAN   FRANCISCO         ......     252 

INTERIOR  OF  NEW  CHINESE  TELEPHONE  EXCHANGE, 

SAN    FRANCISCO         .  .  .  .  .      262 

THEODORE   N.   VAIL,   PRESIDENT  OF   THE   AMERICAN 

TELEGRAPH  AND  TELEPHONE  COMPANY         .  .      274 

ANDREW  CARNEGIE  TALKING  FROM  WASHINGTON, 
D.  C.,  TO  THE  ASSOCIATED  PRESS  BANQUET,  NEW 
YORK  CITY,  DECEMBER  20,  1909  .  ..  .  282 


THE    HISTORY  OF  THE 
TELEPHONE 

CHAPTER  I 

THE   BIRTH   OF   THE   TELEPHONE 

TN  that  somewhat  distant  year  1875,  when  the 
-*•  telegraph  and  the  Atlantic  cable  were  the 
most  wonderful  things  in  the  world,  a  tall  young 
professor  of  elocution  was  desperately  busy  in  a 
noisy  machine-shop  that  stood  in  one  of  the  nar- 
row streets  of  Boston,  not  far  from  Scollay 
Square.  It  was  a  very  hot  afternoon  in  June, 
but  the  young  professor  had  forgotten  the  heat 
and  the  grime  of  the  workshop.  He  was  wholly 
absorbed  in  the  making  of  a  nondescript  machine, 
a  sort  of  crude  harmonica  with  a  clock-spring 
reed,  a  magnet,  and  a  wire.  It  was  a  most 
absurd  toy  in  appearance.  It  was  unlike  any 
other  thing  that  had  ever  been  made  in  any  coun- 
try. The  young  professor  had  been  toiling  over 
it  for  three  years  and  it  had  constantly  baffled 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

him,  until,  on  this  hot  afternoon  in  June,  1875, 
he  heard  an  almost  inaudible  sound  —  a  faint 
twang  —  come  from  the  machine  itself. 

For  an  instant  he  was  stunned.  He  had  been 
expecting  just  such  a  sound  for  several  months, 
but  it  came  so  suddenly  as  to  give  him  the  sen- 
sation of  surprise.  His  eyes  blazed  with  delight, 
and  he  sprang  in  a  passion  of  eagerness  to  an 
adjoining  room  in  which  stood  a  young  mechanic 
who  was  assisting  him. 

"Snap  that  reed  again,  Watson,"  cried  the  ap- 
parently irrational  young  professor.  There 
was  one  of  the  odd-looking  machines  in  each 
room,  so  it  appears,  and  the  two  were  connected 
by  an  electric  wire.  Watson  had  snapped  the 
reed  on  one  of  the  machines  and  the  professor 
had  heard  from  the  other  machine  exactly  the 
same  sound.  It  was  no  more  than  the  gentle 
twang  of  a  clock-spring;  but  it  was  the  first  time 
in  the  history  of  the  world  that  a  complete  sound 
had  been  carried  along  a  wire,  reproduced  per- 
fectly at  the  other  end,  and  heard  by  an  expert 
in  acoustics. 

That  twang  of  the  clock-spring  was  the  first 

[12] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tiny  cry  of  the  newborn  telephone,  uttered  in  the 
clanging  din  of  a  machine-shop  and  happily 
heard  by  a  man  whose  ear  had  been  trained  to 
recognize  the  strange  voice  of  the  little  new- 
comer. There,  amidst  flying  belts  and  jarring 
wheels,  the  baby  telephone  was  born,  as  feeble 
and  helpless  as  any  other  baby,  and  "with  no 
language  but  a  cry." 

The  professor-inventor,  who  had  thus  rescued 
the  tiny  foundling  of  science,  was  a  young  Scot- 
tish American.  His  name,  now  known  as  widely 
as  the  telephone  itself,  was  Alexander  Graham 
Bell.  He  was  a  teacher  of  acoustics  and  a  stu- 
dent of  electricity,  possibly  the  only  man  in  his 
generation  who  was  able  to  focus  a  knowledge 
of  both  subjects  upon  the  problem  of  the  tele- 
phone. To  other  men  that  exceedingly  faint 
sound  would  have  been  as  inaudible  as  silence 
itself;  but  to  Bell  it  was  a  thunder-clap.  It  was 
a  dream  come  true.  It  was  an  impossible  thing 
which  had  in  a  flash  become  so  easy  that  he  could 
scarcely  believe  it.  Here,  without  the  use  of  a 
battery,  with  no  more  electric  current  than  that 
made  by  a  couple  of  magnets,  all  the  wa-vps  nf 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

a  sound  had  been  carried  along  a  wire  and 
changed  back  to  sound  at  the  farther  end.  It 
was  absurd.  It  was  incredible.  It  was  some- 
thing which  neither  wire  nor  electricity  had  been 
known  to  do  before.  But  it  was  true. 

No  discovery  has  ever  been  less  accidental. 
It  was  the  last  link  of  a  long  chain  of  dis- 
coveries. It  was  the  result  of  a  persistent  and 
deliberate  search.  Already,  for  half  a  year 
or  longer,  Bell  had  known  the  correct  theory  of 
the  telephone;  but  he  had  not  realized  that  the 
feeble  undulatory  current  generated  by  a  magnet 
was  strong  enough  for  the  transmission  of  speech. 
He  had  been  taught  to  undervalue  the  incredible 

ciency  of  electricity. 

Not  only  was  Bell  himself  a  teacher  of  the 
laws  of  speech,  so  highly  skilled  that  he  was 
an  instructor  in  Boston  University.  His  father, 
also,  his  two  brothers,  his  uncle,  and  his  grand- 
father had  taught  the  laws  of  speech  in  the  uni- 
versities of  Edinburgh,  Dublin,  and  London. 
For  three  generations  the  Bells  had  been  profes- 
sors of  the  science  of  talking.  They  had  even 
helped  to  create  that  science  by  several  inven- 

[14] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tions.  The  first  of  them,  Alexander  Bell,  had 
invented  a  system  for  the  correction  of  stammer- 
ing and  similar  defects  of  speech.  The  second, 
Alexander  Melville  Bell,  was  the  dean  of  British 
elocutionists,  a  man  of  creative  brain  and  a  most 
impressive  facility  of  rhetoric.  He  was  the  au- 
thor of  a  dozen  text-books  on  the  art  of  speak- 
ing correctly,  and  also  of  a  most  ingenious 
sign-language  which  he  called  "Visible  Speech." 
Every  letter  in  the  alphabet  of  this  language 
represented  a  certain  action  of  the  lips  and 
tongue;  so  that  a  new  method  was  provided  for 
those  who  wished  to  learn  foreign  languages  or 
to  speak  their  own  language  more  correctly. 
And  the  third  of  these  speech-improving  Bells, 
the  inventor  of  the  telephone,  inherited  the 
peculiar  genius  of  his  fathers,  both  inventive  and 
rhetorical,  to  such  a  degree  that  as  a  boy  he  had 
constructed  an  artificial  skull,  from  gutta-percha 
and  India  rubber,  which,  when  enlivened  by  a 
blast  of  air  from  a  hand-bellows,  would  actually 
pronounce  several  words  in  an  almost  human 
manner. 

The  third  Bell,  the  only  one  of  this  remarkable 

[15] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

family  who  concerns  us  at  this  time,  was  a  young 
man,  barely  twenty-eight,  at  the  time  when  his 
ear  caught  the  first  cry  of  the  telephone.  But  he 
was  already  a  man  of  some  note  on  his  own  ac- 
count. He  had  been  educated  in  Edinburgh,  the 
city  of  his  birth,  and  in  London;  and  had  in  one 
way  and  another  picked  up  a  smattering  of 
anatomy,  music,  electricity,  and  telegraphy. 
Until  he  was  sixteen  years  of  age,  he  had  read 
nothing  but  novels  and  poetry  and  romantic  tales 
of  Scottish  heroes.  Then  he  left  home  to  be- 
come a  teacher  of  elocution  in  various  British 
schools,  and  by  the  time  he  was  of  age  he  had 
made  several  slight  discoveries  as  to  the  nature 
of  vowel-sounds.  Shortly  afterwards,  he  met  in 
London  two  distinguished  men,  Alexander  J. 
Ellis  and  Sir  Charles  Wheatstone,  who  did  far 
more  than  they  ever  knew  to  forward  Bell  in 
the  direction  of  the  telephone. 

Ellis  was  the  president  of  the  London  Philo- 
logical Society.  Also,  he  was  the  translator 
of  the  famous  book  on  "The  Sensations  of  Tone," 
written  by  Helmholtz,  who,  in  the  period  from 
1871  to  1894  made  Berlin  the  world-centre  for 

[16] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

the  study  of  the  physical  sciences.  So  it  hap- 
pened that  when  Bell  ran  to  Ellis  as  a  young 
enthusiast  and  told  his  experiments,  Ellis  in- 
formed him  that  Helmholtz  had  done  the  same 
things  several  years  before  and  done  them  more 
completely.  He  brought  Bell  to  his  house  and 
showed  him  what  Helmholtz  had  done  —  how  he 
had  kept  tuning-forks  in  vibration  by  the  power 
of  electro-magnets,  and  blended  the  tones  of  sev- 
eral tuning-forks  together  to  produce  the  com- 
plex quality  of  the  human  voice. 

Now,  Helmholtz  had  not  been  trying  to  invent 
a  telephone,  nor  any  sort  of  message-carrier. 
His  aim  was  to  point  out  the  physical  basis  of 
music,  and  nothing  more.  But  this  fact  that 
an  electro-magnet  would  set  a  tuning-fork  hum- 
ming was  new  to  Bell  and  very  attractive.  It 
appealed  at  once  to  him  as  a  student  of  speech. 
If  a  tuning-fork  could  be  made  to  sing  by  a 
magnet  or  an  electrified  wire,  why  would  it  not 
be  possible  to  make  a  musical  telegraph  —  a  tele- 
graph with  a  piano  key-board,  so  that  many  mes- 
sages could  be  sent  at  once  over  a  single  wire? 
Unknown  to  Bell,  there  were  several  dozen  inven- 

[17] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tors  then  at  work  upon  this  problem,  which 
proved  in  the  end  to  be  very  elusive.  But  it  gave 
him  at  least  a  starting-point,  and  he  forthwith 
commenced  his  quest  of  the  telephone. 

As  he  was  then  in  England,  his  first  step  was 
naturally  to  visit  Sir  Charles  Wheatstone,  the 
best  known  English  expert  on  telegraphy. 
Sir  Charles  had  earned  his  title  by  many  inven- 
tions. He  was  a  simple-natured  scientist,  and 
treated  Bell  with  the  utmost  kindness.  He 
showed  him  an  ingenious  talking-machine  that 
had  been  made  by  Baron  de  Kempelin.  At  this 
time  Bell  was  twenty-two  and  unknown ;  Wheat- 
stone  was  sixty-seven  and  famous.  And  the 
personality  of  the  veteran  scientist  made  so  vivid 
a  picture  upon  the  mind  of  the  impressionable 
young  Bell  that  the  grand  passion  of  science  be- 
came henceforth  the  master-motif  of  his  life. 

From  this  summit  of  glorious  ambition  he  was 
thrown,  several  months  later,  into  the  depths  of 
grief  and  despondency.  The  White  Plague  had 
come  to  the  home  in  Edinburgh  and  taken  away 
his  two  brothers.  More,  it  had  put  its  mark 
upon  the  young  inventor  himself.  Nothing  but 

[18] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

a  change  of  climate,  said  his  doctor,  would  put 
him  out  of  danger.  And  so,  to  save  his  life,  he 
and  his  father  and  mother  set  sail  from  Glasgow 
and  came  to  the  small  Canadian  town  of  Brant- 
ford,  where  for  a  year  he  fought  down  his 
tendency  to  consumption,  and  satisfied  his  nerv- 
ous energy  by  teaching  "Visible  Speech"  to  a 
tribe  of  Mohawk  Indians. 

'  By  this  time  it  had  become  evident,  both  to 
his  parents  and  to  his  friends,  that  young  Gra- 
ham was  destined  to  become  some  sort  of  a  crea- 
tive genius.  He  was  tall  and  supple,  with  a  pale 
complexion,  large  nose,  full  lips,  jet-black  eyes, 
and  jet-black  hair,  brushed  high  and  usually 
rumpled  into  a  curly  tangle.  In  temperament 
he  was  a  true  scientific  Bohemian,  with  the  ideals 
of  a  savant  and  the  disposition  of  an  artist.  He 
was  wholly  a  man  of  enthusiasms,  more  devoted 
to  ideas  than  to  people ;  and  less  likely  to  master 
his  own  thoughts  than  to  be  mastered  by  them. 
He  had  no  shrewdness,  in  any  commercial  sense, 
and  very  little  knowledge  of  the  small  practical 
details  of  ordinary  living.  He  was  always  in- 
tense, always  absorbed.  When  he  applied  his 

[19] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

mind  to  a  problem,  it  became  at  once  an  enthrall- 
ing arena,  in  which  there  went  whirling  a  chariot- 
race  of  ideas  and  inventive  fancies. 

He  had  been  fascinated  from  boyhood  by  his 
father's  system  of  "Visible  Speech."  He  knew 
it  so  well  that  he  once  astonished  a  professor  of 
Oriental  languages  by  repeating  correctly  a  sen- 
tence of  Sanscrit  that  had  been  written  in  "Visi- 
ble Speech"  characters.  While  he  was  living  in 
London  his  most  absorbing  enthusiasm  was  the 
instruction  of  a  class  of  deaf-mutes,  who  could 
be  trained  to  talk,  he  believed,  by  means  of  the 
"Visible  Speech"  alphabet.  He  was  so  deeply 
impressed  by  the  progress  made  by  these  pupils, 
and  by  the  pathos  of  their  dumbness,  that  when 
he  arrived  in  Canada  he  was  in  doubt  as  to  which 
of  these  two  tasks  was  the  more  important  —  the 
teaching  of  deaf-mutes  or  the  invention  of  a 
musical  telegraph. 

At  this  point,  and  before  Bell  had  begun  to 
experiment  with  his  telegraph,  the  scene  of  the 
story  shifts  from  Canada  to  Massachusetts.  It 
appears  that  his  father,  while  lecturing  in  Bos- 
ton, had  mentioned  Graham's  exploits  with  a 

[20] 


1876 

BELL  TELEPHONE 


FIRST  BELL  TELEPHONES,   PHOTOGRAPHED  FROM 
THE    ORIGINAL    INSTRUMENTS    IN    THE 
PATENT  OFFICE  AT  WASHINGTON 


FIRST  EXCHANGE  SWITCH 

BOARD  WITH  TWENTY 

CIRCUITS  EQUIPPED 

IN  1878 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

class  of  deaf-mutes ;  and  soon  afterward  the  Bos- 
ton Board  of  Education  wrote  to  Graham,  offer- 
ing him  five  hundred  dollars  if  he  would  come  to 
Boston  and  introduce  his  system  of  teaching  in  a 
school  for  deaf-mutes  that  had  been  opened  re- 
cently. The  young  man  joyfully  agreed,  and  on 
the  first  of  April,  1871,  crossed  the  line  and  be- 
came for  the  remainder  of  his  life  an  American. 

For  the  next  two  years  his  telegraphic  work 
was  laid  aside,  if  not  forgotten.  His  success  as 
a  teacher  of  deaf-mutes  was  sudden  and  over- 
whelming. It  was  the  educational  sensation  of 
1871.  It  won  him  a  professorship  in  Boston 
University;  and  brought  so  many  pupils  around 
him  that  he  ventured  to  open  an  ambitious 
"School  of  Vocal  Physiology,"  which  became  at 
once  a  profitable  enterprise.  For  a  time  there 
seemed  to  be  little  hope  of  his  escaping  from  the 
burden  of  this  success  and  becoming  an  inventor, 
when,  by  a  most  happy  coincidence,  two  of  his 
pupils  brought  to  him  exactly  the  sort  of  stimula- 
tion and  practical  help  that  he  needed  and  had 
not  up  to  this  time  received. 

One  of  these  pupils  was  a  little  deaf-mute 

[21] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tot,  five  years  of  age,  named  Georgie  Sanders. 
^Bell  had  agreed  to  give  him  a  series  of  private 
lessons  for  $350  a  year;  and  as  the  child  lived 
with  his  grandmother  in  the  city  of  Salem,  sixteen 
miles  from  Boston,  it  was  agreed  that  Bell  should 
make  his  home  with  the  Sanders  family.  Here 
he  not  only  found  the  keenest  interest  and  sym- 
pathy in  his  air-castles  of  invention,  but  also  was 
given  permission  to  use  the  cellar  of  the  house  as 
his  workshop. 

For  the  next  three  years  this  cellar  was  his 
favorite  retreat.  He  littered  it  with  tuning- 
forks,  magnets,  batteries,  coils  of  wire,  tin 
trumpets,  and  cigar-boxes.  No  one  outside  of 
the  Sanders  family  was  allowed  to  enter  it,  as 
Bell  was  nervously  afraid  of  having  his  ideas 
stolen.  He  would  even  go  to  five  or  six  stores 
to  buy  his  supplies,  for  fear  that  his  intentions 
should  be  discovered.  Almost  with  the  secrecy 
of  a  conspirator,  he  worked  alone  in  this  cellar, 
usually  at  night,  and  quite  oblivious  of  the  fact 
that  sleep  was  a  necessity  to  him  and  to  the 
Sanders  family. 

"Often  in  the  middle  of  the  night  Bell  would 

[22] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

wake  me  up,"  said  Thomas  Sanders,  the  father 
of  Georgie.  "His  black  eyes  would  be  blazing 
with  excitement.  Leaving  me  to  go  down  to 
the  cellar,  he  would  rush  wildly  to  the  barn  and 
begin  to  send  me  signals  along  his  experimental 
wires.  If  I  noticed  any  improvement  in  his 
machine,  he  would  be  delighted.  He  would  leap 
and  whirl  around  in  one  of  his  'war-dances'  and 
then  go  contentedly  to  bed.  But  if  the  experi- 
ment was  a  failure,  he  would  go  back  to  his  work- 
bench and  try  some  different  plan." 

The  second  pupil  who  became  a  factor  —  a 
very  considerable  factor  —  in  Bell's  career  was  a 
fifteen-year-old  girl  named  Mabel  Hubbard,  who 
had  lost  her  hearing,  and  consequently  her  speech, 
through  an  attack  of  scarlet-fever  when  a  baby. 
She  was  a  gentle  and  lovable  girl,  and  Bell,  in  his 
ardent  and  headlong  way,  lost  his  heart  to  her 
completely ;  and  four  years  later,  he  had  the  hap- 
piness of  making  her  his  wife.  Mabel  Hubbard 
did  much  to  encourage  Bell.  She  followed  each 
step  of  his  progress  with  the  keenest  interest. 
She  wrote  his  letters  and  copied  his  patents.  She 
cheered  him  on  when  he  felt  himself  beaten. 

[23] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

And  through  her  sympathy  with  Bell  and  his  am- 
bitions, she  led  her  father  —  a  widely  known  Bos- 
ton lawyer  named  Gardiner  G.  Hubbard  —  to 
become  Bell's  chief  spokesman  and  defender,  a 
true  apostle  of  the  telephone. 

Hubbard  first  became  aware  of  Bell's  inven- 
tive efforts  one  evening  when  Bell  was  visiting 
at  his  home  in  Cambridge.  Bell  was  illustrating 
some  of  the  mysteries  of  acoustics  by  the  aid  of 
a  piano.  "Do  you  know,"  he  said  to  Hubbard, 
"that  if  I  sing  the  note  G  close  to  the  strings  of 
the  piano,  that  the  G-string  will  answer  me?" 
"Well,  what  then?"  asked  Hubbard.  "It  is 
a  fact  of  tremendous  importance,"  replied  Bell. 
"It  is  an  evidence  that  we  may  some  day  have 
a  musical  telegraph,  which  will  send  as  many 
messages  simultaneously  over  one  wire  as  there 
are  notes  on  that  piano." 

Later,  Bell  ventured  to  confide  to  Hubbard 
his  wild  dream  of  sending  speech  over  an  electric 
wire,  but  Hubbard  laughed  him  to  scorn.  "Now 
you  are  talking  nonsense,"  he  said.  "Such  a 
thing  never  could  be  more  than  a  scientific  toy. 
You  had  better  throw  that  idea  out  of  your  mind 

[24] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

and  go  ahead  with  your  musical  telegraph,  which 
if  it  is  successful  will  make  you  a  millionaire." 

But  the  longer  Bell  toiled  at  his  musical  tele- 
graph, the  more  he  dreamed  of  replacing  the  tele- 
graph and  its  cumbrous  sign-language  by  a  new 
machine  that  would  carry,  not  dots  and  dashes, 
but  the  human  voice.  "If  I  can  make  a  deaf- 
mute  talk,"  he  said,  "I  can  make  iron  talk."  For 
months  he  wavered  between  the  two  ideas.  He 
had  no  more  than  the  most  hazy  conception  of 
what  this  voice-carrying  machine  would  be  like. 
At  first  he  conceived  of  having  a  harp  at  one  end 
of  the  wire,  and  a  speaking-trumpet  at  the  other, 
so  that  the  tones  of  the  voice  would  be  repro- 
duced by  the  strings  of  the  harp. 

Then,  in  the  early  Summer  of  1874,  while  he 
was  puzzling  over  this  harp  apparatus,  the  dim 
outline  of  a  new  path  suddenly  glinted  in  front 
of  him.  He  had  not  been  forgetful  of  "Visible 
Speech"  all  this  while,  but  had  been  making  ex- 
periments with  two  remarkable  machines  —  the 
phoriautograph  and  the  manometric  capsule,  by 
means  of  which  the  vibrations  of  sound  were 
made  plainly  visible.  If  these  could  be  im- 

[25] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

proved,  he  thought,  then  the  deaf  might  be  taught 
to  speak  by  sight  —  by  learning  an  alphabet  of 
vibrations.  He  mentioned  these  experiments  to 
a  Boston  friend,  Dr.  Clarence  J.  Blake,  and  he, 
being  a  surgeon  and  an  aurist,  naturally  said, 
"Why  don't  you  use  a  real  ear?  " 

Such  an  idea  never  had,  and  probably  never 
could  have,  occurred  to  Bell;  but  he  accepted  it 
with  eagerness.  Dr.  Blake  cut  an  ear  from  a  dead 
man's  head,  together  with  the  ear-drum  and  the 
associated  bones.  Bell  took  this  fragment  of 
a  skull  and  arranged  it  so  that  a  straw  touched 
the  ear-drum  at  one  end  and  a  piece  of  moving 
smoked  glass  at  the  other.  Thus,  when  Bell 
spoke  loudly  into  the  ear,  the  vibrations  of  the 
drum  made  tiny  markings  upon  the  glass. 

It  was  one  of  the  most  extraordinary  incidents 
in  the  whole  history  of  the  telephone.  To  an 
uninitiated  onlooker,  nothing  could  have  been 
more  ghastly  or  absurd.  How  could  any  one 
have  interpreted  the  gruesome  joy  of  this  young 
professor  with  the  pale  face  and  the  black 
eyes,  who  stood  earnestly  singing,  whispering, 
and  shouting  into  a  dead  man's  ear?  What 

[26] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

sort  of  a  wizard  must  he  be,  or  ghoul,  or  mad- 
man? And  in  Salem,  too,  the  home  of  the 
witchcraft  superstition!  Certainly  it  would 
not  have  gone  well  with  Bell  had  he  lived 
two  centuries  earlier  and  been  caught  at  such 
black  magic. 

What  had  this  dead  man's  ear  to  do  with  the 
invention  of  the  telephone?  Much.  Bell  no- 
ticed how  small  and  thin  was  the  ear-drum,  and 
yet  how  effectively  it  could  send  thrills  and  vibra- 
tions through  heavy  bones.  "If  this  tiny  disc 
can  vibrate  a  bone,"  he  thought,  "then  an  iron 
disc  might  vibrate  an  iron  rod,  or  at  least,  an  iron 
wire."  In  a  flash  the  conception  of  a  membrane 
telephone  was  pictured  in  his  mind.  He  saw  in 
imagination  two  iron  discs,  or  ear-drums,  far 
apart  and  connected  by  an  electrified  wire,  catch- 
ing the  vibrations  of  sound  at  one  end,  and  repro- 
ducing them  at  the  other.  At  last  he  was  on  the 
right  path,  and  had  a  theoretical  knowledge  of 
what  a  speaking  telephone  ought  to  be.  What 
remained  to  be  done  was  to  construct  such  a  ma- 
chine and  find  out  how  the  electric  current  could 
best  be  brought  into  harness. 

[27] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Then,  as  though  Fortune  suddenly  felt  that  he 
was  winning  this  stupendous  success  too  easily, 
Bell  was  flung  back  by  an  avalanche  of  troubles. 
Sanders  and  Hubbard,  who  had  been  paying  the 
cost  of  his  experiments,  abruptly  announced  that 
they  would  pay  no  more  unless  he  confined  his 
attention  to  the  musical  telegraph,  and  stopped 
wasting  his  time  on  ear-toys  that  never  could  be 
of  any  financial  value.  What  these  two  men 
asked  could  scarcely  be  denied,  as  one  of  them 
was  his  best-paying  patron  and  the  other  was  the 
father  of  the  girl  whom  he  hoped  to  marry.  "If 
you  wish  my  daughter,"  said  Hubbard,  "you  must 
abandon  your  foolish  telephone."  Bell's  "School 
of  Vocal  Physiology,"  too,  from  which  he  had 
hoped  so  much,  had  come  to  an  inglorious  end. 
He  had  been  too  much  absorbed  in  his  experi- 
ments to  sustain  it.  His  professorship  had  been 
given  up,  and  he  had  no  pupils  except  Georgie 
Sanders  and  Mabel  Hubbard.  He  was  poor, 
much  poorer  than  his  associates  knew.  And  his 
mind  was  torn  and  distracted  by  the  contrary 
calls  of  science,  poverty,  business,  and  affection. 
Pouring  out  his  sorrows  in  a  letter  to  his  mother, 

[28] 


03  ffi  > 
>  M  cn 


H  r  QO 
r  "* 
25$ 

i|i 

r  S 

S 

P3 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

he  said:  "I  am  now  beginning  to  realize  the 
cares  and  anxieties  of  being  an  inventor.  I  have 
had  to  put  off  all  pupils  and  classes,  for  flesh  and 
blood  could  not  stand  much  longer  such  a  strain 
as  I  have  had  upon  me." 

While  stumbling  through  this  Slough  of  De- 
spond, he  was  called  to  Washington  by  his  patent 
lawyer.  Not  having  enough  money  to  pay  the 
cost  of  such  a  journey,  he  borrowed  the  price  of  a 
return  ticket  from  Sanders  and  arranged  to  stay 
with  a  friend  in  Washington,  to  save  a  hotel  bill 
that  he  could  not  afford.  At  that  time  Professor 
Joseph  Henry,  who  knew  more  of  the  theory  of 
electrical  science  than  any  other  American,  was 
the  Grand  Old  Man  of  Washington;  and  poor 
Bell,  in  his  doubt  and  desperation,  resolved  to 
run  to  him  for  advice. 

Then  came  a  meeting  which  deserves  to  be 
historic.  For  an  entire  afternoon  the  two  men 
worked  together  over  the  apparatus  that  Bell  had 
brought  from  Boston,  just  as  Henry  had  worked 
over  the  telegraph  before  Bell  was  born.  Henry 
was  now  a  veteran  of  seventy-eight,  with  only 
three  years  remaining  to  his  credit  in  the  bank 

[29] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

of  Time,  while  Bell  was  twenty-eight.  There 
was  a  long  half -century  between  them;  but  the 
youth  had  discovered  a  New  Fact  that  the  sage, 
in  all  his  wisdom,  had  never  known. 

"You  are  in  possession  of  the  germ  of  a  great 
invention,"  said  Henry,  "and  I  would  advise  you 
to  work  at  it  until  you  have  made  it  complete." 

"But,"  replied  Bell,  "I  have  not  got  the  elec- 
trical knowledge  that  is  necessary." 

"Get  it,"  responded  the  aged  scientist. 

"I  cannot  tell  you  how  much  these  two  words 
have  encouraged  me,"  said  Bell  afterwards,  in 
describing  this  interview  to  his  parents.  "I  live 
too  much  in  an  atmosphere  of  discouragement  for 
scientific  pursuits;  and  such  a  chimerical  idea  as 
telegraphing  vocal  sounds  would  indeed  seem  to 
most  minds  scarcely  feasible  enough  to  spend 
time  in  working  over." 

By  this  time  Bell  had  moved  his  workshop  from 
the  cellar  in  Salem  to  109  Court  Street,  Boston, 
where  he  had  rented  a  room  from  Charles 
Williams,  a  manufacturer  of  electrical  supplies. 
Thomas  A.  Watson  was  his  assistant,  and  both 

[30] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Bell  and  Watson  lived  nearby,  in  two  cheap  little 

bedrooms.     The  rent  of  the  workshop  and  bed- 

* 

rooms,  and  Watson's  wages  of  nine  dollars  a 
week,  were  being  paid  by  Sanders  and  Hubbard. 
Consequently,  when  Bell  returned  from  Wash- 
ington, he  was  compelled  by  his  agreement  to 
devote  himself  mainly  to  the  musical  telegraph, 
although  his  heart  was  now  with  the  telephone. 
For  exactly  three  months  after  his  interview  with 
Professor  Henry,  he  continued  to  plod  ahead, 
along  both  lines,  until,  on  that  memorable  hot 
afternoon  in  June,  1875,  the  full  twang  of  the 
clock-spring  came  over  the  wire,  and  the  tele- 
phone was  born. 

From  this  moment,  Bell  was  a  man  of  one  pur- 
pose. He  won  over  Sanders  and  Hubbard.  He 
converted  Watson  into  an  enthusiast.  He  for- 
got his  musical  telegraph,  his  "Visible  Speech/' 
his  classes,  his  poverty.  He  threw  aside  a  pro- 
fession in  which  he  was  already  locally  famous. 
And  he  grappled  with  this  new  mystery  of  elec- 
tricity, as  Henry  had  advised  him  to  do,  encour- 
aging himself  with  the  fact  that  Morse,  who  was 

[31] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

only  a  painter,  had  mastered  his  electrical  diffi- 
culties, and  there  was  no  reason  why  a  prof essor 
of  acoustics  should  not  do  as  much. 

The  telephone  was  now  in  existence,  but  it  was 
the  youngest  and  feeblest  thing  in  the  nation.  It 
had  not  yet  spoken  a  word.  It  had  to  be  taught, 
developed,  and  made  fit  for  the  service  of  the 
irritable  business  world.  All  manner  of  discs 
had  to  be  tried,  some  smaller  and  thinner  than  a 
dime  and  others  of  steel  boiler-plate  as  heavy  as 
the  shield  of  Achilles.  In  all  the  books  of  elec- 
trical science,  there  was  nothing  to  help  Bell  and 
Watson  in  this  journey  they  were  making 
through  an  unknown  country.  They  were  as 
chartless  as  Columbus  was  in  1492.  Neither 
they  nor  any  one  else  had  acquired  any  experi- 
ence in  the  rearing  of  a  young  telephone.  No 
one  knew  what  to  do  next.  There  was  nothing 
to  know. 

For  forty  weeks  —  long  exasperating  weeks  — 
the  telephone  could  do  no  more  than  gasp  and 
make  strange  inarticulate  noises.  Its  educators 
had  not  learned  how  to  manage  it.  Then,  on 
March  10,  1876,  it  talked.  It  said  distinctly  — 

[32] 


GARDINER  G.   HUBBARD  IN   1876 


(  UNIVERSITY 


FORHi 


THOMAS    A.    WATSON    IN   1878 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

"Mr.  Watson,  come  here,  I  want  you"  Wat- 
son, who  was  at  the  lower  end  of  the  wire,  in  the 
basement,  dropped  the  receiver  and  rushed  with 
wild  joy  up  three  flights  of  stairs  to  tell  the  glad 
tidings  to  Bell.  "I  can  hear  you!"  he  shouted 
breathlessly.  "I  can  hear  the  words" 

It  was  not  easy,  of  course,  for  the  weak  young 
telephone  to  make  itself  heard  in  that  noisy  work- 
shop. No  one,  not  even  Bell  and  Watson,  was 
familiar  with  its  odd  little  voice.  Usually  Wat- 
son, who  had  a  remarkably  keen  sense  of  hearing, 
did  the  listening;  and  Bell,  who  was  a  professional 
elocutionist,  did  the  talking.  And  day  by  day 
the  tone  of  the  baby  instrument  grew  clearer  —  a 
new  note  in  the  orchestra  of  civilization. 

On  his  twenty-ninth  birthday,  Bell  received 
his  patent,  No.  174,465  — "the  most  valuable 
single  patent  ever  issued"  in  any  country.  He 
had  created  something  so  entirely  new  that  there 
was  no  name  for  it  in  any  of  the  world's  lan- 
guages. In  describing  it  to  the  officials  of  the 
Patent  Office,  he  was  obliged  to  call  it  "an  im- 
provement in  telegraphy,"  when,  in  truth,  it  was 
nothing  of  the  kind.  It  was  as  different  from  the 

[S3] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

telegraph  as  the  eloquence  of  a  great  orator  is 
from  the  sign-language  of  a  deaf-mute. 

Other  inventors  had  worked  from  the  stand- 
point of  the  telegraph;  and  they  never  did,  and 
never  could,  get  any  better  results  than  signs 
and  symbols.  But  Bell  worked  from  the  stand- 
point of  the  human  voice.  He  cross-fertilized 
the  two  sciences  of  acoustics  and  electricity.  His 
study  of  "Visible  Speech"  had  trained  his  mind 
so  that  he  could  mentally  see  the  shape  of  a  word 
as  he  spoke  it.  He  knew  what  a  spoken  word 
was,  and  how  it  acted  upon  the  air,  or  the  ether, 
that  carried  its  vibrations  from  the  lips  to  the  ear. 
He  was  a  third-generation  specialist  in  the 
nature  of  speech,  and  he  knew  that  for  the  trans- 
mission of  spoken  words  there  must  be  "a  pulsa- 
tory action  of  the  electric  current  which  is  the 
exact  equivalent  of  the  aerial  impulses." 

Bell  knew  just  enough  about  electricity,  arid 
not  too  much.  He  did  not  know  the  possible 
from  the  impossible.  "Had  I  known  more  about 
electricity,  and  less  about  sound,"  he  said,  "I 
would  never  have  invented  the  telephone." 
What  he  had  done  was  so  amazing,  so  foolhardy, 

[34] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

that  no  trained  electrician  could  have  thought 
of  it.  It  was  "the  very  hardihood  of  invention," 
and  yet  it  was  not  in  any  sense  a  chance  discov- 
ery. It  was  the  natural  output  of  a  mind  that 
had  been  led  to  assemble  just  the  right  materials 
for  such  a  product. 

As  though  the  very  stars  in  their  courses  were 
working  for  this  young  wizard  with  the 
talking  wire,  the  Centennial  Exposition  in 
Philadelphia  opened  its  doors  exactly  two 
months  after  the  telephone  had  learned  to 
talk.  Here  was  a  superb  opportunity  to 
let  the  wide  world  know  what  had  been 
done,  and  fortunately  Hubbard  was  one  of  the 
Centennial  Commissioners.  By  his  influence  a 
small  table  was  placed  in  the  Department  of  Ed- 
ucation, in  a  narrow  space  between  a  stairway 
and  a  wall,  and  on  this  table  was  deposited  the 
first  of  the  telephones. 

Bell  had  no  intention  of  going  to  the  Cen- 
tennial himself.  He  was  too  poor.  Sanders 
and  Hubbard  had  never  done  more  than  pay  his 
room-rent  and  the  expense  of  his  experiments. 
For  his  three  or  four  years  of  inventing  he  had  re- 

[35] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

ceived  nothing  as  yet  —  nothing  but  his  patent. 
In  order  to  live,  he  had  been  compelled  to 
reorganize  his  classes  in  "Visible  Speech,"  and 
to  pick  up  the  ravelled  ends  of  his  neglected 
profession. 

But  one  Friday  afternoon,  toward  the  end  of 
June,  his  sweetheart,  Mabel  Hubbard,  was  taking 
the  train  for  the  Centennial;  and  he  went  to  the 
depot  to  say  good-bye.  Here  Miss  Hubbard 
learned  for  the  first  time  that  Bell  was  not  to 
go.  She  coaxed  and  pleaded,  without  effect. 
Then,  as  the  train  was  starting,  leaving  Bell  on 
the  platform,  the  affectionate  young  girl  could 
no  longer  control  her  feelings  and  was  overcome 
by  a  passion  of  tears.  At  this  the  susceptible 
Bell,  like  a  true  Sir  Galahad,  dashed  after  the 
moving  train  and  sprang  aboard,  without  ticket 
or  baggage,  oblivious  of  his  classes  and  his  pov- 
erty and  of  all  else  except  this  one  maiden's 
distress.  "I  never  saw  a  man,"  said  Watson,  "so 
much  in  love  as  Bell  was." 

As  it  happened,  this  impromptu  trip  to  the 
Centennial  proved  to  be  one  of  the  most  timely 
acts  of  his  life.  On  the  following  Sunday  after- 

[36] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

noon  the  judges  were  to  make  a  special  tour  of 
inspection,  and  Mr.  Hubbard,  after  much  trouble, 
had  obtained  a  promise  that  they  would  spend  a 
few  minutes  examining  Bell's  telephone.  By 
this  time  it  had  been  on  exhibition  for  more 
than  six  weeks,  without  attracting  the  serious 
attention  of  anybody. 

When  Sunday  afternoon  arrived,  Bell  was  at 
his  little  table,  nervous,  yet  confident.  But  hour 
after  hour  went  by,  and  the  judges  did  not  arrive. 
The  day  was  intensely  hot,  and  they  had  many 
wonders  to  examine.  There  was  the  first  elec- 
tric light,  and  the  first  grain-binder,  and  the 
musical  telegraph  of  Elisha  Gray,  and  the  mar- 
vellous exhibit  of  printing  telegraphs  shown  by 
the  Western  Union  Company.  By  the  time  they 
came  to  Bell's  table,  through  a  litter  of  school- 
desks  and  blackboards,  the  hour  was  seven 
o'clock,  and  every  man  in  the  party  was  hot,  tired, 
and  hungry.  Several  announced  their  intention 
of  returning  to  their  hotels.  One  took  up  a  tele- 
phone receiver,  looked  at  it  blankly,  and  put  it 
down  again.  He  did  not  even  place  it  to  his  ear. 
Another  judge  made  a  slighting  remark  which 

[37] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

raised  a  laugh  at  Bell's  expense.  Then  a  most 
marvellous  thing  happened  —  such  an  incident  as 
would  make  a  chapter  in  "The  Arabian  Nights 
Entertainments." 

Accompanied  by  his  wife,  the  Empress 
Theresa,  and  by  a  bevy  of  courtiers,  the  Emperor 
of  Brazil,  Dom  Pedro  de  Alcantara,  walked 
into  the  room,  advanced  with  both  hands  out- 
stretched to  the  bewildered  Bell,  and  exclaimed: 
"Professor  Bell,  I  am  delighted  to  see  you 
again."  The  judges  at  once  forgot  the  heat 
and  the  fatigue  and  the  hunger.  Who  was 
this  young  inventor,  with  the  pale  complexion 
and  black  eyes,  that  he  should  be  the  friend 
of  Emperors?  They  did  not  know,  and  for 
the  moment  even  Bell  himself  had  forgotten, 
that  Dom  Pedro  had  once  visited  Bell's  class 
of  deaf-mutes  at  Boston  University.  He  was 
especially  interested  in  such  humanitarian  work, 
and  had  recently  helped  to  organize  the  first 
Brazilian  school  for  deaf-mutes  at  Rio  de 
Janeiro.  And  so,  with  the  tall,  blond-bearded 
Dom  Pedro  in  the  centre,  the  assembled  judges, 
and  scientists  —  there  were  fully  fifty  in  all  — 

[38] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

entered  with  unusual  zest  into  the  proceedings  of 
this  first  telephone  exhibition. 

A  wire  had  been  strung  from  one  end  of  the 
room  to  the  other,  and  while  Bell  went  to  the 
transmitter,  Dom  Pedro  took  up  the  receiver  and 
placed  it  to  his  ear.  It  was  a  moment  of  tense 
expectancy.  No  one  knew  clearly  what  was 
about  to  happen,  when  the  Emperor,  with  a 
dramatic  gesture,  raised  his  head  from  the  re- 
ceiver and  exclaimed  with  a  look  of  utter  amaze- 
ment :  "My  God  —  it  talks!" 

Next  came  to  the  receiver  the  oldest  scientist 
in  the  group,  the  venerable  Joseph  Henry,  whose 
encouragement  to  Bell  had  been  so  timely.  He 
stopped  to  listen,  and,  as  one  of  the  bystanders 
afterwards  said,  no  one  could  forget  the  look  of 
awe  that  came  into  his  face  as  he  heard  that  iron 
disc  talking  with  a  human  voice.  "This,"  said 
he,  "comes  nearer  to  overthrowing  the  doctrine 
of  the  conservation  of  energy  than  anything  I 


ever  saw." 


Then  came  Sir  William  Thomson,  latterly 
known  as  Lord  Kelvin.  It  was  fitting  that  he 
should  be  there,  for  he  was  the  foremost  elec- 

[39] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

trical  scientist  at  that  time  in  the  world,  and  had 
been  the  engineer  of  the  first  Atlantic  Cable. 
He  listened  and  learned  what  even  he  had  not 
known  before,  that  a  solid  metallic  body  could 
take  up  from  the  air  all  the  countless  varieties  of 
vibrations  produced  by  speech,  and  that  these 
vibrations  could  be  carried  along  a  wire  and  re- 
produced exactly  by  a  second  metallic  body.  He 
nodded  his  head  solemnly  as  he  rose  from  the 
receiver.  "It  does  speak,"  he  said  emphatically. 
"It  is  the  most  wonderful  thing  I  have  seen  in 
America." 

So,  one  after  another,  this  notable  company 
of  men  listened  to  the  voice  of  the  first  telephone, 
and  the  more  they  knew  of  science,  the  less  they 
were  inclined  to  believe  their  ears.  The  wiser 
they  were,  the  more  they  wondered.  To  Henry 
and  Thomson,  the  masters  of  electrical  magic,  this 
instrument  was  as  surprising  as  it  was  to  the  man 
in  the  street.  And  both  were  noble  enough  to 
admit  frankly  their  astonishment  in  the  reports 
which  they  made  as  judges,  when  they  gave  Bell 
a  Certificate  of  Award.  "Mr.  Bell  has  achieved 
a  result  of  transcendent  scientific  interest," 

[40] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

wrote  Sir  William  Thomson.  "I  heard  it  speak 
distinctly  several  sentences.  ...  I  was 
astonished  and  delighted.  .  .  It  is  the 

greatest  marvel  hitherto  achieved  by  the  electric 
telegraph." 

Until  nearly  ten  o'clock  that  night  the  judges 
talked  and  listened  by  turns  at  the  telephone. 
Then,  next  morning,  they  brought  the  apparatus 
to  the  judges'  pavilion,  where  for  the  remainder 
of  the  summer  it  was  mobbed  by  judges  and  sci- 
entists. Sir  William  Thomson  and  his  wife  ran 
back  and  forth  between  the  two  ends  of  the  wire 
like  a  pair  of  delighted  children.  And  thus  it 
happened  that  the  crude  little  instrument  that 
had  been  tossed  into  an  out-of-the-way  corner 
became  the  star  of  the  Centennial.  It  had  been 
given  no  more  than  eighteen  words  in  the  official 
catalogue,  and  here  it  was  acclaimed  as  the  won- 
der of  wonders.  It  had  been  conceived  in  a  cellar 
and  born  in  a  machine-shop ;  and  now,  of  all  the 
gifts  that  our  young  American  Republic  had 
received  on  its  one-hundredth  birthday,  the  tele- 
phone was  honored  as  the  rarest  and  most  wel- 
come of  them  all. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   BUILDING   OF   THE   BUSINESS 

A  FTER  the  telephone  had  been  born  in  Bos- 
-f"^  ton,  baptized  in  the  Patent  Office,  and 
given  a  royal  reception  at  the  Philadelphia  Cen- 
tennial, it  might  be  supposed  that  its  life  thence- 
forth would  be  one  of  peace  and  pleasantness. 
But  as  this  is  history,  and  not  fancy,  there  must 
be  set  down  the  very  surprising  fact  that  the 
young  newcomer  received  no  welcome  and  no 
notice  from  the  great  business  world.  "It  is  a 
scientific  toy,"  said  the  men  of  trade  and  com- 
merce. "It  is  an  interesting  instrument,  of 
course,  for  professors  of  electricity  and  acoustics ; 
but  it  can  never  be  a  practical  necessity.  As 
well  might  you  propose  to  put  a  telescope  into 
a  steel-mill  or  to  hitch  a  balloon  to  a  shoe- 
factory." 

Poor  Bell,  instead  of  being  applauded,  was 
pelted  with  a  hailstorm  of  ridicule.     He  was  an 

[42]- 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

"impostor,"  a  "ventriloquist,"  a  "crank  who  says 
he  can  talk  through  a  wire."  The  London  Times 
alluded  pompously  to  the  telephone  as  the  latest 
American  humbug,  and  gave  many  profound 
reasons  why  speech  could  not  be  sent  over  a  wire, 
because  of  the  intermittent  nature  of  the  electric 
current.  AlmosAdl  electricians  —  the  men  who 
were  supposed  to  know  —  pronounced  the  tele- 
phone an  impossible  thing;  and  those  who  did 
not  openly  declare  it  to  be  a  hoax,  believed  that 
Bell  had  stumbled  upon  some  freakish  use  of 
electricity,  which  could  never  be  of  any  practical 
value. 

Even  though  he  came  late  in  the  succession  of 
inventors,  Bell  had  to  run  the  gantlet  of  scoffing 
and  adversity.  By  the  reception  that  the  public 
gave  to  his  telephone,  he  learned  to  sympathize 
with  Howe,  whose  first  sewing-machine  was 
smashed  by  a  Boston  mob;  with  McCormick, 
whose  first  reaper  was  called  "a  cross  between  an 
Astley  chariot,  a  wheelbarrow,  and  a  flying- 
machine";  with  Morse,  whom  ten  Congresses  re- 
garded as  a  nuisance;  with  Cyrus  Field,  whose 
Atlantic  Cable  was  denounced  as  "a  mad  freak 

[43] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

of  stubborn  ignorance";  and  with  Westinghouse, 
who  was  called  a  fool  for  proposing  "to  stop  a 
railroad  train  with  wind." 

The  very  idea  of  talking  at  a  piece  of  sheet- 
iron  was  so  new  and  extraordinary  that  the  nor- 
mal mind  repulsed  it.  Alike  to  the  laborer  and 
the  scientist,  it  was  incompiAensible.  It  was 
too  freakish,  too  bizarre,  to  be  used  outside  of 
the  laboratory  and  the  museum.  No  one,  liter- 
ally, could  understand  how  it  worked;  and  the 
only  man  who  offered  a  clear  solution  of  the 
mystery  was  a  Boston  mechanic,  who  main- 
tained that  there  was  "a  hole  through  the  middle 
of  the  wire." 

People  who  talked  for  the  first  time  into  a  tele- 
phone box  had  a  sort  of  stage  fright.  They 
felt  foolish.  To  do  so  seemed  an  absurd  per- 
formance, especially  when  they  had  to  shout  at 
the  top  of  their  voices.  Plainly,  whatever  of 
convenience  there  might  be  in  this  new  contriv- 
ance was  far  outweighed  by  the  loss  of  personal 
dignity;  and  very  few  men  had  sufficient  imag- 
ination to  picture  the  telephone  as  a  part  of  the 
machinery  of  their  daily  work.  The  banker  said 

[44] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

it  might  do  well  enough  for  grocers,  but  that  it 
would  never  be  of  any  value  to  banking;  and  the 
grocer  said  it  might  do  well  enough  for  bankers, 
but  that  it  would  never  be  of  any  value  to  grocers. 

As  Bell  had  worked  out  his  invention  in  Salem, 
one  editor  displayed  the  headline,  "Salem  Witch- 
craft." The  New  York  Herald  said:  "The 
effect  is  weird  and  almost  supernatural."  The 
Providence  Press  said:  "It  is  hard  to  resist 
the  notion  that  the  powers  of  darkness  are  some- 
how in  league  with  it."  And  The  Boston  Times 
said,  in  an  editorial  of  bantering  ridicule:  "A 
fellow  can  now  court  his  girl  in  China  as  well 
as  in  East  Boston;  but  the  most  serious  aspect 
of  this  invention  is  the  awful  and  irresponsible 
power  it  will  give  to  the  average  mother-in- 
law,  who  will  be  able  to  send  her  voice  around 
the  habitable  globe." 

There  were  hundreds  of  shrewd  capitalists  in 
American  cities  in  1876,  looking  with  sharp  eyes 
in  all  directions  for  business  chances;  but  not  one 
of  them  came  to  Bell  with  an  offer  to  buy  his 
patent.  Not  one  came  running  for  a  State  con- 
tract. And  neither  did  any  legislature,  or 

^    [45] 


THE      HISTORY      OFTHE      TELEPHONE 

city  council,  come  forward  to  the  task  of  giving 
the  people  a  cheap  and  efficient  telephone  service. 
As  for  Bell  himself,  he  was  not  a  man  of  affairs. 
In  all  practical  business  matters,  he  was  as  in- 
competent as  a  Byron  or  a  Shelley.  He  had 
done  his  part,  and  it  now  remained  for  men  of 
different  abilities  to  take  up  his  telephone  and 
adapt  it  to  the  uses  and  conditions  of  the  busi- 
ness world. 

The  first  man  to  undertake  this  work  was  Gar- 
diner G.  Hubbard,  who  became  soon  afterwards 
the  father-in-law  of  Bell.  He,  too,  was  a  man 
of  enthusiasm  rather  than  of  efficiency.  He  was 
not  a  man  of  wealth  or  business  experience,  but 
he  was  admirably  suited  to  introduce  the  tele- 
phone to  a  hostile  public.  His  father  had  been 
a  judge  of  the  Massachusetts  Supreme  Court; 
and  he  himself  was  a  lawyer  whose  practice  had 
been  mainly  in  matters  of  legislation.  He  was, 
in  1876,  a  man  of  venerable  appearance,  with 
white  hair,  worn  long,  and  a  patriarchal  beard. 
He  was  a  familiar  figure  in  Washington,  and  well 
known  among  the  public  men  of  his  day.  A  ver- 
satile and  entertaining  companion,  by  turns 

[46] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

prosperous  and  impecunious,  and  an  optimist 
always,  Gardiner  Hubbard  became  a  really  in- 
dispensable factor  as  the  first  advance  agent  of 
the  telephone  business. 

No  other  citizen  had  done  more  for  the  city  of 
Cambridge  than  Hubbard.  It  was  he  who  se- 
cured gas  for  Cambridge  in  1853,  and  pure 
water,  and  a  street-railway  to  Boston.  He  had 
gone  through  the  South  in  1860  in  the  patriotic 
hope  that  he  might  avert  the  impending  Civil 
War.  He  had  induced  the  legislature  to  estab- 
lish the  first  public  school  for  deaf-mutes,  the 
school  that  drew  Bell  to  Boston  in  1871.  And  he 
had  been  for  years  a  most  restless  agitator  for 
improvements  in  telegraphy  and  the  post  office. 
So,  as  a  promoter  of  schemes  for  the  public  good, 
Hubbard  was  by  no  means  a  novice.  His  first 
step  toward  capturing  the  attention  of  an  indif- 
ferent nation  was  to  beat  the  big  drum  of  pub- 
licity. He  saw  that  this  new  idea  of  telephoning 
must  be  made  familiar  to  the  public  mind.  He 
talked  telephone  by  day  and  by  night.  When- 
ever he  travelled,  he  carried  a  pair  of  the  magical 
instruments  in  his  valise,  and  gave  demonstra- 

[47] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tions  on  trains  and  in  hotels.  He  buttonholed 
every  influential  man  who  crossed  his  path. 
He  was  a  veritable  "Ancient  Mariner"  of  the 
telephone.  No  possible  listener  was  allowed  to 
escape. 

Further  to  promote  this  campaign  of  publicity, 
Hubbard  encouraged  Bell  and  Watson  to  per- 
form a  series  of  sensational  feats  with  the  tele- 
phone. A  telegraph  wire  between  New  York 
and  Boston  was  borrowed  for  half  an  hour,  and 
in  the  presence  of  Sir  William  Thomson,  Bell 
sent  a  tune  over  the  two-hundred-and-fifty-mile 
line.  "Can  you  hear?"  he  asked  the  operator 
at  the  New  York  end.  "Elegantly,"  responded 
the  operator.  "What  tune?"  asked  Bell. 
"Yankee  Doodle,"  came  the  answer.  Shortly 
afterwards,  while  Bell  was  visiting  at  his 
father's  house  in  Canada,  he  bought  up  all  the 
stove-pipe  wire  in  the  town,  and  tacked  it  to 
a  rail  fence  between  the  house  and  a  telegraph 
office.  Then  he  went  to  a  village  eight  miles 
distant  and  sent  scraps  of  songs  and  Shake- 
spearean quotations  over  the  wire. 

There  was  still  a  large  percentage  of  people 

[48] 


ts  th- 
eighth 
e  will 

1876. 


on  of 
aclm- 
,  you 
cntial 
tfully 


FOUR    CENTS. 


-  the 
>re.  I 
n  a  fie 
;le  a 

that 
and 
hich 


TELEPHONY. 


:    SPEECH    CONYEYED 
MILES  BY  TELEGRAPH, 

PROFESSOR  A.  GRAHAM  BELLAS  DISCOV- 
i:i;V— srrr'ESSFUL  AND  INTERESTING  EX- 
PERIMENTS—THE RECORD  OF  A  CONVER- 
SATION CARRIED  ON  BETWEEN  BOSTOJC, 
AND  C  AMIUUDGEPOET. 

Ihe  following  account  of  an  experiment  mad» 
on  the  evening  of  October  9  by  Alexander  Graham. 
Dell  and  Thomas  A.  Watson  is  interesting, as  bein£ 
the  record  of  the  first  conversation  ever  carried 
on  by  word  of  mouth  over  a  telegraph  wire.    Tele- 
phones were  placed  at  either  end  of  ;i  telegraph 
line  owned  by  the  Walworth  Manufacturing  Com- 
pany, extending   from   their   office  in  Boston  to 
their   factor^  in   Cambridgeport,  a   distance   of 
about  two  mile*,.  The  company's  battery,  consist- 
ing of  nine  Daniels  cells,  was 'removed 'from  the 
circuit  and  another  of  ten  carbon  elements  sub- 
stituten.    Articulate  conversation  then  took  place 
through  the  wire.    The  sounds,  at  first  faint  and 
indistinct,  became  suddenly  quite  loud  and  intel- 
igible.    Mr.  Bell  in  Boston  and  Mr.  Watson  in 
Cambridge  then  took  notes  of  what  was  said  and 
heard,  and  the  comparison  of  the  two  records  is 
most  interesting,  as  showing  the  accuracy  of  the 
'lectrical  transmission: — 


with 

JVlr.  Watson —  There  was       Mr.  Watson— There  is  Htt^ 
othing    the, matter    with   Ihiagthe  matter  with1  SemT 


CONTEMPORANEOUS    NEWSPAPER    ACCOUNT    IN    BOSTON    ADVERTISER 
OF    FIRST    TELEPHONE    CONVERSATION 


UNIVERSITY 

OF 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

who  denied  that  spoken  words  could  be  trans- 
mitted by  a  wire.  When  Watson  talked  to  Bell 
at  public  demonstrations,  there  were  newspaper 
editors  who  referred  sceptically  to  "the  supposi- 
titious Watson."  So,  to  silence  these  doubters, 
Bell  and  Watson  planned  a  most  severe  test 
of  the  telephone.  They  borrowed  the  telegraph 
line  between  Boston  and  the  Cambridge  Obser- 
vatory, and  attached  a  telephone  to  each  end. 
Then  they  maintained,  for  three  hours  or  longer, 
the  first  sustained  conversation  by  telephone, 
each  one  taking  careful  notes  of  what  he  said 
and  of  what  he  heard.  These  notes  were  pub- 
lished in  parallel  columns  in  The  Boston  Adver- 
tiser, October  19,  1876,  and  proved  beyond 
question  that  the  telephone  was  now  a  practical 
success. 

After  this,  one  event  crowded  quickly  on  the 
heels  of  another.  A  series  of  ten  lectures  was 
arranged  for  Bell,  at  a  hundred  dollars  a  lec- 
ture, which  was  the  first  money  payment  he 
had  received  for  his  invention.  His  opening 
night  was  in  Salem,  before  an  audience 
of  five  hundred  people,  and  with  Mrs.  Sand- 

[49] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

ers,  the  motherly  old  lady  who  had  sheltered 
Bell  in  the  days  of  his  experiment,  sitting 
proudly  in  one  of  the  front  seats.  A  pole 
was  set  up  at  the  front  of  the  hall,  supporting 
the  end  of  a  telegraph  wire  that  ran  from  Salem 
to  Boston.  And  Watson,  who  became  the  first 
public  talker  by  telephone,  sent  messages  from 
Boston  to  various  members  of  the  audience.  An 
account  of  this  lecture  was  sent  by  telephone  to 
The  Boston  Globe,  which  announced  the  next 
morning  — 

"This  special  despatch  of  the  Globe  has  been  trans- 
mitted by  telephone  in  the  presence  of  twenty  people, 
who  have  thus  been  witnesses  to  a  feat  never  before  at- 
tempted —  the  sending  of  news  over  the  space  of  sixteen 
miles  by  the  human  voice." 

This  Globe  despatch  awoke  the  newspaper 
editors  with  an  unexpected  jolt.  For  the  first 
time  they  began  to  notice  that  there  was 
a  new  word  in  the  language,  and  a  new 
idea  in  the  scientific  world.  No  newspaper 
had  made  any  mention  whatever  of  the 
telephone  for  seventy-five  days  after  Bell 
received  his  patent.  Not  one  of  the  swarm 

[50] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

of  reporters  who  thronged  the  Philadelphia 
Centennial  had  regarded  the  telephone  as  a 
matter  of  any  public  interest.  But  when  a  col- 
umn of  news  was  sent  by  telephone  to  The  Bos- 
ton Globe,  the  whole  newspaper  world  was  agog 
with  excitement.  A  thousand  pens  wrote  the 
name  of  Bell.  Requests  to  repeat  his  lecture 
came  to  Bell  from  Cyrus  W.  Field,  the  veteran 
of  the  Atlantic  Cable,  from  the  poet  Longfellow, 
and  from  many  others. 

As  he  was  by  profession  an  elocutionist,  Bell 
was  able  to  make  the  most  of  these  opportunities. 
His  lectures  became  popular  entertainments. 
They  were  given  in  the  largest  halls.  At  one 
lecture  two  Japanese  gentlemen  were  induced  to 
talk  to  one  another  in  their  own  language,  via 
the  telephone.  At  a  second  lecture  a  band 
played  "The  Star-Spangled  Banner,"  in  Boston, 
and  was  heard  by  an  audience  of  two  thousand 
people  in  Providence.  At  a  third,  Signor  Fer- 
ranti,  who  was  in  Providence,  sang  a  selection 
from  "The  Marriage  of  Figaro"  to  an  audience 
in  Boston.  At  a  fourth,  an  exhortation  from 
Moody  and  a  song  from  Sankey  came  over  the 

[51} 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

vibrating  wire.  And  at  a  fifth,  in  New  Haven, 
Bell  stood  sixteen  Yale  professors  in  line,  hand 
in  hand,  and  talked  through  their  bodies  —  a 
feat  which  was  then,  and  is  to-day,  almost  too 
wonderful  to  believe. 

Very  slowly  these  lectures,  and  the  tireless 
activity  of  Hubbard,  pushed  back  the  ridicule 
and  the  incredulity;  and  in  the  merry  month  of 
May,  1877,  a  man  named  Emery  drifted  into 
Hubbard's  office  from  the  near-by  city  of  Charles- 
town,  and  leased  two  telephones  for  twenty 
actual  dollars  —  the  first  money  ever  paid  for  a 
telephone.  This  was  the  first  feeble  sign  that 
such  a  novelty  as  the  telephone  business  could  be 
established;  and  no  money  ever  looked  hand- 
somer than  this  twenty  dollars  did  to  Bell, 
Sanders,  Hubbard,  and  Watson.  It  was  the 
tiny  first-fruit  of  fortune. 

Greatly  encouraged,  they  prepared  a  little  cir- 
cular which  was  the  first  advertisement  of  the 
telephone  business.  It  is  an  oddly  simple  little 
document  to-day,  but  to  the  1877  brain  it  was 
startling.  It  modestly  claimed  that  a  telephone 
was  superior  to  a  telegraph  for  three  reasons: 

[52] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

"(1)  No  skilled  operator  is  required,  but  direct  com- 
munication may  be  had  by  speech  without  the  inter- 
vention of  a  third  person. 

"(2)  The  communication  is  much  more  rapid,  the 
average  number  of  words  transmitted  in  a  minute  by  the 
Morse  sounder  being  from  fifteen  to  twenty,  by  tele- 
phone from  one  to  two  hundred. 

"(3)  No  expense  is  required,  either  for  its  operation 
or  repair.  It  needs  no  battery  and  has  no  complicated 
machinery.  It  is  unsurpassed  for  economy  and  sim- 
plicity." 

The  only  telephone  line  in  the  world  at  this 
time  was  between  the  Williams'  workshop  in 
Boston  and  the  home  of  Mr.  Williams  in  Somer- 
ville.  But  in  May,  1877,  a  young  man  named 
E.  T.  Holmes,  who  was  running  a  burglar-alarm 
business  in  Boston,  proposed  that  a  few  tele- 
phones be  linked  to  his  wires.  He  was  a  friend 
and  customer  of  Williams,  and  suggested  this 
plan  half  in  jest  and  half  in  earnest.  Hubbard 
was  quick  to  seize  this  opportunity,  and  at  once 
lent  Holmes  a  dozen  telephones.  Without  ask- 
ing permission,  Holmes  went  into  six  banks  and 
nailed  up  a  telephone  in  each.  Five  bankers 
made  no  protest,  but  the  sixth  indignantly 
ordered  "that  playtoy"  to  be  taken  out.  The 

[53] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

other  five  telephones  could  be  connected  by  a 
switch  in  Holmes's  office,  and  thus  was  born  the 
first  tiny  and  crude  Telephone  Exchange.  Here 
it  ran  for  several  weeks  as  a  telephone  system 
by  day  and  a  burglar-alarm  by  night.  No 
money  was  paid  by  the  bankers.  The  service 
was  given  to  them  as  an  exhibition  and  an  adver- 
tisement. The  little  shelf  with  its  five  telephones 
was  no  more  like  the  marvellous  exchanges  of 
to-day  than  a  canoe  is  like  a  Cunarder,  but  it  was 
unquestionably  the  first  place  where  several  tele- 
phone wires  came  together  and  could  be  united. 

Soon  afterwards,  Holmes  took  his  telephones 
out  of  the  banks,  and  started  a  real  telephone 
business  among  the  express  companies  of  Boston. 
But  by  this  time  several  exchanges  had  been 
opened  for  ordinary  business,  in  New  Haven, 
Bridgeport,  New  York,  and  Philadelphia. 
Also,  a  man  from  Michigan  had  arrived,  with  the 
hardihood  to  ask  for  a  State  agency  —  George 
W.  Balch,  of  Detroit.  He  was  so  welcome  that 
Hubbard  joyfully  gave  him  everything  he  asked 
—  a  perpetual  right  to  the  whole  State  of  Mich- 
igan. Balch  was  not  required  to  pay  a  cent  in 

[54] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

advance,  except  his  railway  fare,  and  before  he 
was  many  years  older  he  had  sold  his  lease  for 
a  handsome  fortune  of  a  quarter  of  a  million 
dollars,  honestly  earned  by  his  initiative  and 
enterprise. 

By  August,  when  Bell's  patent. was  sixteen 
months  old,  there  were  778  telephones  in  use. 
This  looked  like  success  to  the  optimistic  Hub- 
bard.  He  decided  that  the  time  had  come  to 
organize  the  business,  so  he  created  a  simple 
agreement  which  he  called  the  "Bell  Telephone 
Association."  This  agreement  gave  Bell,  Hub- 
bard  and  Sanders  a  three-tenths  interest  apiece 
in  the  patents,  and  Watson  one-tenth.  There 
was  no  capital.  There  was  none  to  be  had. 
The  four  men  had  at  this  time  an  absolute 
monopoly  of  the  telephone  business;  and  every- 
body else  was  quite  willing  that  they  should 
have  it. 

The  only  man  who  had  money  and  dared  to 
stake  it  on  the  future  of  the  telephone  was 
Thomas  Sanders,  and  he  did  this  not  mainly  for 
business  reasons.  Both  he  and  Hubbard  were 
attached  to  Bell  primarily  by  sentiment,  as  Bell 

[55] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE     TELEPHONE 

had  removed  the  blight  of  dumbness  from 
Sanders's  little  son,  and  was  soon  to  marry 
Hubbard's  daughter. 

Also,  Sanders  had  no  expectation,  at  first,  that 
so  much  money  would  be  needed.  He  was  not 
rich.  His  entire  business,  which  was  that  of  cut- 
ting out  soles  for  shoe  manufacturers,  was  not  at 
any  time  worth  more  than  thirty-five  thousand 
dollars.  Yet,  from  1874  to  1878,  he  had 
advanced  nine-tenths  of  the  money  that  was  spent 
on  the  telephone.  He  had  paid  Bell's  room-rent, 
and  Watson's  wages,  and  Williams's  expenses, 
and  the  cost  of  the  exhibit  at  the  Centennial. 
The  first  five  thousand  telephones,  and  more, 
were  made  with  his  money.  And  so  many  long, 
expensive  months  dragged  by  before  any 
relief  came  to  Sanders,  that  he  was  com- 
pelled, much  against  his  will  and  his  business 
judgment,  to  stretch  his  credit  within  an  inch 
of  the  breaking-point  to  help  Bell  and  the  tele- 
phone. Desperately  he  signed  note  after  note 
until  he  faced  a  total  of  one  hundred  and  ten 
thousand  dollars.  If  the  new  "scientific  toy" 
succeeded,  which  he  often  doubted,  he  would 

[56] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

be  the  richest  citizen  in  Haverhill;  and  if  it 
failed,  which  he  sorely  feared,  he  would  be  a 
bankrupt. 

A  disheartening  series  of  rebuffs  slowly  forced 
the  truth  in  upon  Sanders's  mind  that  the  busi- 
ness world  refused  to  accept  the  telephone  as  an 
article  of  commerce.  It  was  a  toy,  a  plaything, 
a  scientific  wonder,  but  not  a  necessity  to  be 
bought  and  used  for  ordinary  purposes  by  ordi- 
nary people.  Capitalists  treated  it  exactly  as 
they  treated  the  Atlantic  Cable  project  when 
Cyrus  Field  visited  Boston  in  1862.  They 
admired  and  marvelled ;  but  not  a  man  subscribed 
a  dollar.  Also,  Sanders  very  soon  learned  that  it 
was  a  most  unpropitious  time  for  the  setting 
afloat  of  a  new  enterprise.  It  was  a  period  of 
turmoil  and  suspicion.  What  with  the  Jay 
Cooke  failure,  the  Hayes-Tilden  deadlock,  and 
the  bursting  of  a  hundred  railroad  bubbles, 
there  was  very  little  in  the  news  of  the  day  to 
encourage  investors. 

It  was  impossible  for  Sanders,  or  Bell,  or  Hub- 
bard,  to  prepare  any  definite  plan.  No  matter 
what  the  plan  might  have  been,  they  had  no 

[57] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

money  to  put  it  through.  They  believed  that 
they  had  something  new  and  marvellous,  which 
some  one,  somewhere,  would  be  willing  to  buy. 
Until  this  good  genie  should  arrive,  they  could  do 
no  more  than  flounder  ahead,  and  take  whatever 
business  was  the  nearest  and  the  cheapest.  So 
while  Bell,  in  eloquent  rhapsodies,  painted  word- 
pictures  of  a  universal  telephone  service  to  ap- 
plauding audiences,  Sanders  and  Hubbard  were 
leasing  telephones  two  by  two,  to  business  men 
who  previously  had  been  using  the  private  lines 
of  the  Western  Union  Telegraph  Company. 

This  great  corporation  was  at  the  time  their 
natural  and  inevitable  enemy.  It  had  swallowed 
most  of  its  competitors,  and  was  reaching  out  to 
monopolize  all  methods  of  communication  by 
wire.  The  rosiest  hope  that  shone  in  front  of 
Sanders  and  Hubbard  was  that  the  Western 
Union  might  conclude  to  buy  the  Bell  patents, 
just  as  it  had  already  bought  many  others.  In 
one  moment  of  discouragement  they  had  offered 
the  telephone  to  President  Orton,  of  the  Western 
Union,  for  $100,000;  and  Orton  had  refused  it. 

[58] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

"What  use,"  he  asked  pleasantly,  "could  this 
company  make  of  an  electrical  toy?" 

But  besides  the  operation  of  its  own  wires,  the 
Western  Union  was  supplying  customers  with 
various  kinds  of  printing-telegraphs  and  dial 
telegraphs,  some  of  which  could  transmit  sixty 
words  a  minute.  These  accurate  instruments,  it 
believed,  could  never  be  displaced  by  such  a  scien- 
tific oddity  as  the  telephone.  And  it  continued 
to  believe  this  until  one  of  its  subsidiary  com- 
panies —  the  Gold  and  Stock  —  reported  that 
several  of  its  machines  had  been  superseded  by 
telephones. 

At  once  the  Western  Union  awoke  from  its 
indifference.  Even  this  tiny  nibbling  at  its  busi- 
ness must  be  stopped.  It  took  action  quickly 
and  organized  the  "American  Speaking-Tele- 
phone Company,"  with  $300,000  capital,  and 
with  three  electrical  inventors,  Edison,  Gray,  and 
Dolbear,  on  its  staff.  With  all  the  bulk  of  its 
great  wealth  and  prestige,  it  swept  down  upon 
Bell  and  his  little  bodyguard.  It  trampled  upon 
Bell's  patent  with  as  little  concern  as  an  elephant 

[59] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

can  have  when  he  tramples  upon  an  ant's  nest. 
To  the  complete  bewilderment  of  Bell,  it  coolly 
announced  that  it  had  "the  only  original  tele- 
phone," and  that  it  was  ready  to  supply  "supe- 
rior telephones  with  all  the  latest  improvements 
made  by  the  original  inventors  —  Dolbear,  Gray, 
and  Edison." 

The  result  was  strange  and  unexpected.  The 
Bell  group,  instead  of  being  driven  from  the 
field,  were  at  once  lifted  to  a  higher  level  in  the 
business  world.  The  effect  was  as  if  the  Stand- 
ard Oil  Company  were  to  commence  the  manu- 
facture of  aeroplanes.  In  a  flash,  the  telephone 
ceased  to  be  a  "scientific  toy,"  and  became  an 
article  of  commerce.  It  began  for  the  first  time 
to  be  taken  seriously.  And  the  Western  Union, 
in  the  endeavor  to  protect  its  private  lines,  be- 
came involuntarily  a  bell-wether  to  lead  capital- 
ists in  the  direction  of  the  telephone. 

Sanders's  relatives,  who  were  many  and  rich, 
came  to  his  rescue.  Most  of  them  were  well- 
known  business  men  —  the  Bradleys,  the  Salton- 
stalls,  Fay,  Silsbee,  and  Carlton.  These  men, 

[60] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

together  with  Colonel  William  H.  Forbes,  who 
came  in  as  a  friend  of  the  Bradleys,  were  the  first 
capitalists  who,  for  purely  business  reasons,  in- 
vested money  in  the  Bell  patents.  Two  months 
after  the  Western  Union  had  given  its  weighty 
endorsement  to  the  telephone,  these  men  organ- 
ized a  company  to  do  business  in  New  England 
only,  and  put  fifty  thousand  dollars  in  its 
treasury. 

In  a  short  time  the  delighted  Hubbard  found 
himself  leasing  telephones  at  the  rate  of  a  thou- 
sand a  month.  He  was  no  longer  a  promoter, 
but  a  general  manager.  Men  were  standing  in 
line  to  ask  for  agencies.  Crude  little  telephone 
exchanges  were  being  started  in  a  dozen  or  more 
cities.  There  was  a  spirit  of  confidence  and  en- 
terprise ;  and  the  next  step,  clearly,  was  to  create 
a  business  organization.  None  of  the  partners 
were  competent  to  undertake  such  a  work. 
Hubbard  had  little  aptitude  as  an  organizer;  Bell 
had  none;  and  Sanders  was  held  fast  by  his 
leather  interests.  Here,  at  last,  after  four  years 
of  the  most  heroic  effort,  were  the  raw  materials 

[61] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

out  of  which  a  telephone  business  could  be  con- 
structed. But  who  was  to  be  the  builder,  and 
where  was  he  to  be  found? 

One  morning  the  indefatigable  Hubbard 
solved  the  problem.  "Watson,"  he  said,  "there  's 
a  young  man  in  Washington  who  can  handle 
this  situation,  and  I  want  you  to  run  down 
and  see  what  you  think  of  him."  Watson 
went,  reported  favorably,  and  in  a  day  or 
so  the  young  man  received  a  letter  from 
Hubbard,  offering  him  the  position  of  Gen- 
eral Manager,  at  a  salary  of  thirty-five  hundred 
dollars  a  year.  "We  rely,"  Hubbard  said, 
"upon  your  executive  ability,  your  fidelity,  and 
unremitting  zeal."  The  young  man  replied,  in 
one  of  those  dignified  letters  more  usual  in 
the  nineteenth  than  in  the  twentieth  century. 
"My  faith  in  the  success  of  the  enterprise  is  such 
that  I  am  willing  to  trust  to  it,"  he  wrote,  "and  I 
have  confidence  that  we  shall  establish  the  har- 
mony and  cooperation  that  is  essential  to  the 
success  of  an  enterprise  of  this  kind."  One  week 
later  the  young  man,  Theodore  N.  Vail,  took 
his  seat  as  General  Manager  in  a  tiny  office  in 

[62] 


THEODORE    N.    VAIL    IN    1878 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

Reade  Street,  New  York,  and  the  building  of  the 
business  began. 

This  arrival  of  Vail  at  the  critical  moment  em- 
phasized the  fact  that  Bell  was  one  of  the  most 
fortunate  of  inventors.  He  was  not  robbed  of 
his  invention,  as  might  easily  have  happened. 
One  by  one  there  arrived  to  help  him  a  number  of 
able  men,  with  all  the  various  abilities  that  the 
changing  situation  required.  There  was  such  a 
focussing  of  factors  that  the  whole  matter 
appeared  to  have  been  previously  rehearsed.  No 
sooner  had  Bell  appeared  on  the  stage  than  his 
supporting  players,  each  in  his  turn,  received  his 
cue  and  took  part  in  the  action  of  the  drama. 
There  was  not  one  of  these  men  who  could  have 
done  the  work  of  any  other.  Each  was  distinc- 
tive and  indispensable.  Bell  invented  the  tele- 
phone ;  Watson  constructed  it ;  Sanders  financed 
it ;  Hubbard  introduced  it ;  and  Vail  put  it  on  a 
business  basis. 

The  new  General  Manager  had,  of  course,  no 
experience  in  the  telephone  business.  Neither 
had  any  one  else.  But  he,  like  Bell,  came  to  his 
task  with  a  most  surprising  fitness.  He  was  a 

[63] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

member  of  the  historic  Vail  family  of  Morris- 
town,  New  Jersey,  which  had  operated  the 
Speedwell  Iron  Works  for  four  or  five  genera- 
tions. His  grand-uncle  Stephen  had  built  the 
engines  for  the  Savannah,  the  first  American 
steamship  to  cross  the  Atlantic  Ocean;  and  his 
cousin  Alfred  was  the  friend  and  co-worker  of 
Morse,  the  inventor  of  the  telegraph.  Morse 
had  lived  for  several  years  at  the  Vail  home- 
stead in  Morristown;  and  it  was  here  that  he 
erected  his  first  telegraph  line,  a  three-mile  circle 
around  the  Iron  Works,  in  1838.  He  and 
Alfred  Vail  experimented  side  by  side  in  the 
making  of  the  telegraph,  and  Vail  eventually  re- 
ceived a  fortune  for  his  share  of  the  Morse  patent. 
Thus  it  happened  that  young  Theodore  Vail 
learned  the  dramatic  story  of  Morse  at  his 
mother's  knee.  As  a  boy,  he  played  around  the 
first  telegraph  line,  and  learned  to  put  messages 
on  the  wire.  His  favorite  toy  was  a  little  tele- 
graph that  he  constructed  for  himself.  At 
twenty-two  he  went  West,  in  the  vague  hope  of 
possessing  a  bonanza  farm ;  then  he  swung  back 
into  telegraphy,  and  in  a  few  years  found 

[04] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

himself  in  the  Government  Mail  Service  at  Wash- 
ington. By  1876,  he  was  at  the  head  of  this  De- 
partment, which  he  completely  reorganized.  He 
introduced  the  bag  system  in  postal  cars,  and 
made  war  on  waste  and  clumsiness.  By  virtue 
of  this  position  he  was  the  one  man  in  the  United 
States  who  had  a  comprehensive  view  of  all  rail- 
ways and  telegraphs.  He  was  much  more  apt, 
consequently,  than  other  men  to  develop  the  idea 
of  a  national  telephone  system. 

While  in  the  midst  of  this  bureaucratic  house- 
cleaning  he  met  Hubbard,  who  had  just  been 
appointed  by  President  Hayes  as  the  head  of  a 
commission  on  mail  transportation.  He  and 
Hubbard  were  constantly  thrown  together,  on 
trains  and  in  hotels;  and  as  Hubbard  invariably 
had  a  pair  of  telephones  in  his  valise,  the  two  men 
soon  became  co-enthusiasts.  Vail  found  himself 
painting  brain-pictures  of  the  future  of  the  tele- 
phone; and  by  the  time  that  he  was  asked  to 
become  its  General  Manager,  he  had  become  so 
confident  that,  as  he  said  afterwards,  he  "was 
willing  to  leave  a  Government  job  with  a  small 
salary  for  a  telephone  job  with  no  salary." 

[65] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

So,  just  as  Amos  Kendall  had  left  the  post 
office  service  thirty  years  before  to  establish  the 
telegraph  business,  Theodore  N.  Vail  left  the 
post  office  service  to  establish  the  telephone  busi- 
ness. He  had  been  in  authority  over  thirty-five 
hundred  postal  employees,  and  was  the  developer 
of  a  system  that  covered  every  inhabited  portion 
>of  the  country.  Consequently,  he  had  a  quality  of 
experience  that  was  immensely  valuable  in 
straightening  out  the  tangled  affairs  of  the  tele- 
phone. Line  by  line,  he  mapped  out  a  method,  a 
policy,  a  system.  He  introduced  a  larger  view 
of  the  telephone  business,  and  swept  off  the  table 
all  schemes  for  selling  out.  He  persuaded  half 
a  dozen  of  his  post  office  friends  to  buy  stock,  so 
that  in  less  than  two  months  the  first  "Bell  Tele- 
phone Company"  was  organized,  with  $450,000 
capital  and  a  service  of  twelve  thousand 
telephones. 

Vail's  first  step,  naturally,  was  to  stiffen  up  the 
backbone  of  this  little  company,  and  to  prevent 
the  Western  Union  from  frightening  it  into  a 
surrender.  He  immediately  sent  a  copy  of  Bell's 
patent  to  every  agent,  with  orders  to  hold  the 

[66], 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

fort  against  all  opposition.  "We  have  the  only 
original  telephone  patents,"  he  wrote;  "we  have 
organized  and  introduced  the  business,  and  we  do 
not  propose  to  have  it  taken  from  us  by  any  cor- 
poration." To  one  agent,  who  was  showing  the 
white  feather,  he  wrote : 

"You  have  too  great  an  idea  of  the  Western  Union. 
If  it  was  all  massed  in  your  one  city  you  might  well 
fear  it;  but  it  is  represented  there  by  one  man  only, 
and  he  has  probably  as  much  as  he  can  attend  to  out- 
side of  the  telephone.  For  you  to  acknowledge  that 
you  cannot  compete  with  his  influence  when  you  make 
it  your  special  business,  is  hardly  the  thing.  There 
may  be  a  dozen  concerns  that  will  all  go  to  the  Western 
Union,  but  they  will  not  take  with  them  all  their  friends. 
I  would  advise  that  you  go  ahead  and  keep  your  pres- 
ent advantage.  We  must  organize  companies  with  suf- 
ficient vitality  to  carry  on  a  fight,  as  it  is  simply  useless 
to  get  a  company  started  that  will  succumb  to  the  first 
bit  of  opposition  it  may  encounter." 

Next,  having  encouraged  his  thoroughly 
alarmed  agents,  Vail  proceeded  to  build  up  a 
definite  business  policy.  He  stiffened  up  the 
contracts  and  made  them  good  for  five  years  only. 
He  confined  each  agent  to  one  place,  and  re- 
served all  rights  to  connect  one  city  with  another. 
He  established  a  department  to  collect  and  pro- 

[67] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

tect  any  new  inventions  that  concerned  the  tele- 
phone. He  agreed  to  take  part  of  the  royalties 
in  stock,  when  any  local  company  preferred  to 
pay  its  debts  in  this  way.  And  he  took  steps 
toward  standardizing  all  telephonic  apparatus  by 
controlling  the  factories  that  made  it. 

These  various  measures  were  part  of  Vail's 
plan  to  create  a  national  telephone  system.  His 
central  idea,  from  the  first,  was  not  the  mere 
leasing  of  telephones,  but  rather  the  creation 
of  a  Federal  company  that  would  be  a  permanent 
partner  in  the  entire  telephone  business.  Even 
in  that  day  of  small  things,  and  amidst  the  con- 
fusion and  rough-and-tumble  of  pioneering,  he 
worked  out  the  broad  policy  that  prevails  to-day ; 
and  this  goes  far  to  explain  the  fact  that 
there  are  in  the  United  States  twice  as  many 
telephones  as  there  are  in  all  other  countries 
combined. 

Vail  arrived  very  much  as  Blucher  did  at  the 
battle  of  Waterloo  —  a  trifle  late,  but  in  time  to 
prevent  the  telephone  forces  from  being  routed 
by  the  Old  Guard  of  the  Western  Union.  He 
was  scarcely  seated  in  his  managerial  chair,  when 

[68] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

the  Western  Union  threw  the  entire  Bell  army 
into  confusion  by  launching  the  Edison  trans- 
mitter. Edison,  who  was  at  that  time  fairly 
started  in  his  career  of  wizardry,  had  made  an  in- 
strument of  marvellous  alertness.  It  was  beyond 
all  argument  superior  to  the  telephones  then  in 
use  and  the  lessees  of  Bell  telephones  clamored 
with  one  voice  for  "a  transmitter  as  good  as 
Edison's."  This,  of  course,  could  not  be  had  in  a 
moment,  and  the  five  months  that  followed  were 
the  darkest  days  in  the  childhood  of  the  telephone. 

How  to  compete  with  the  Western  Union, 
which  had  this  superior  transmitter,  a  host  of 
agents,  a  network  of  wires,  forty  millions  of 
capital,  and  a  first  claim  upon  all  newspapers, 
hotels,  railroads,  and  rights  of  way  —  that  was 
the  immediate  problem  that  confronted  the  new 
General  Manager.  Every  inch  of  progress  had 
to  be  fought  for.  Several  of  his  captains  de- 
serted, and  he  was  compelled  to  take  control 
of  their  unprofitable  exchanges.  There  was 
scarcely  a  mail  that  did  not  bring  him  some  bul- 
letin of  discouragement  or  defeat. 

In  the  effort  to  conciliate  a  hostile  public,  the 

[69] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

telephone  rates  had  everywhere  been  made  too 
low.  Hubbard  had  set  a  price  of  twenty  dollars 
a  year,  for  the  use  of  two  telephones  on  a  private 
line;  and  when  exchanges  were  started,  the  rate 
was  seldom  more  than  three  dollars  a  month. 
There  were  deadheads  in  abundance,  mostly  offi- 
cials and  politicians.  In  St.  Louis,  one  of  the 
few  cities  that  charged  a  sufficient  price,  nine- 
tenths  of  the  merchants  refused  to  become  sub- 
scribers. In  Boston,  the  first  pay-station  ran 
three  months  before  it  earned  a  dollar.  Even  as 
late  as  1880,  when  the  first  National  Telephone 
Convention  was  held  at  Niagara  Falls,  one  of  the 
delegates  expressed  the  general  situation  very 
correctly  when  he  said:  "We  were  all  in  a  state 
of  enthusiastic  uncertainty.  We  were  full  of 
hope,  yet  when  we  analyzed  those  hopes  they  were 
very  airy  indeed.  There  was  probably  not  one 
company  that  could  say  it  was  making  a  cent,  nor 
even  that  it  expected  to  make  a  cent.' 

Especially  in  the  largest  cities,  where  the 
Western  Union  had  most  power,  the  lives  of  the 
telephone  pioneers  were  packed  with  hardships 
and  adventures.  In  Philadelphia,  for  instance,  a 

[70] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

resolute  young  man  named  Thomas  E.  Cornish 
was  attacked  as  though  he  had  suddenly  become  a 
public  enemy,  when  he  set  out  to  establish  the 
first  telephone  service.  No  official  would  grant 
him  a  permit  to  string  wires.  His  workmen  were 
arrested.  The  printing-telegraph  men  warned 
him  that  he  must  either  quit  or  be  driven  out. 
When  he  asked  capitalists  for  money,  they  re- 
plied that  he  might  as  well  expect  to  lease  Jew's- 
harps  as  telephones.  Finally,  he  was  compelled 
to  resort  to  strategy  where  argument  had  failed. 
He  had  received  an  order  from  Colonel  Thomas 
Scott,  who  wanted  a  wire  between  his  house  and 
his  office.  Colonel  Scott  was  the  President  of  the 
Pennsylvania  Railroad,  and  therefore  a  man  of 
the  highest  prestige  in  the  city.  So  as  soon  as 
Cornish  had  put  this  line  in  place,  he  kept  his  men 
at  work  stringing  other  lines.  When  the  police 
interfered,  he  showed  them  Colonel  Scott's  signa- 
ture and  was  let  alone.  In  this  way  he  put 
fifteen  wires  up  before  the  trick  was  discovered ; 
and  soon  afterwards,  with  eight  subscribers,  he 
founded  the  first  Philadelphia  exchange. 

As  may  be  imagined,  such  battling  as  this  did 
[71] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

not  put  much  money  into  the  treasury  of  the 
parent  company;  and  the  letters  written  by 
Sanders  at  this  time  prove  that  it  was  in  a  hard 
plight. 

The  following  was  one  of  the  queries  put  to 
Hubbard  by  the  overburdened  Sanders: 

"How  on  earth  do  you  expect  me  to  meet  a 
draft  of  two  hundred  and  seventy-five  dollars 
without  a  dollar  in  the  treasury,  and  with  a  debt 
of  thirty  thousand  dollars  staring  us  in  the  face?" 
"Vail's  salary  is  small  enough,"  he  continued 
in  a  second  letter,  "but  as  to  where  it  is  coming 
from  I  am  not  so  clear.  Bradley  is  awfully  blue 
and  discouraged.  Williams  is  tormenting  me 
for  money  and  my  personal  credit  will  not  stand 
everything.  I  have  advanced  the  Company  two 
thousand  dollars  to-day,  and  Williams  must  have 
three  thousand  dollars  more  this  month.  His 
pay-day  has  come  and  his  capital  will  not  carry 
him  another  inch.  If  Bradley  throws  up  his 
hand,  I  will  unfold  to  you  my  last  desperate 
plan." 

And  if  the  company  had  little  money,  it  had 
less  credit.  Once  when  Vail  had  ordered  a  small 

[72] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

bill  of  goods  from  a  merchant  named  Tillotson,  of 
15  Dey  Street,  New  York,  the  merchant  replied 
that  the  goods  were  ready,  and  so  was  the  bill, 
which  was  seven  dollars.  By  a  strange  coin- 
cidence, the  magnificent  building  of  the  New 
York  Telephone  Company  stands  to-day  on  the 
site  of  Tillotson's  store. 

Month  after  month,  the  little  Bell  Company 
lived  from  hand  to  mouth.  No  salaries  were  paid 
in  full.  Often,  for  weeks,  they  were  not  paid 
at  all.  In  Watson's  note-book  there  are  such 
entries  during  this  period  as  "Lent  Bell  fifty 
cents,"  "Lent  Hubbard  twenty  cents,"  "Bought 
one  bottle  beer  —  too  bad  can't  have  beer  every 
day."  More  than  once  Hubbard  would  have 
gone  hungry  had  not  Devonshire,  the  only  clerk, 
shared  with  him  the  contents  of  a  dinner-pail. 
Each  one  of  the  little  group  was  beset  by  taunts 
and  temptations.  Watson  was  offered  ten  thou- 
sand dollars  for  his  one-tenth  interest,  and  hesi- 
tated three  days  before  refusing  it.  Railroad 
companies  offered  Vail  a  salary  that  was  higher 
and  sure,  if  he  would  superintend  their  mail  busi- 
ness. And  as  for  Sanders,  his  folly  was  the  talk 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

of  Haverhill.  One  Haverhill  capitalist,  E.  J.  M. 
Hale,  stopped  him  on  the  street  and  asked, 
"Have  n't  you  got  a  good  leather  business,  Mr. 
Sanders?"  "Yes,"  replied  Sanders.  "Well," 
said  Hale,  "y°u  had  better  attend  to  it  and  quit 
playing  on  wind  instruments."  Sanders's 
banker,  too,  became  uneasy  on  one  occasion  and 
requested  him  to  call  at  the  bank.  "Mrs 
Sanders,"  he  said,  "I  will  be  obliged  if  you  will 
take  that  telephone  stock  out  of  the  bank,  and 
give  me  in  its  place  your  note  for  thirty  thousand 
dollars.  I  am  expecting  the  examiner  here  in  a 
few  days,  and  I  don't  want  to  get  caught  with 
that  stuff  in  the  bank." 

Then,  in  the  very  midnight  of  this  depression, 
poor  Bell  returned  from  England,  whither  he  and 
his  bride  had  gone  on  their  honeymoon,  and 
announced  that  he  had  no  money;  that  he  had 
failed  to  establish  a  telephone  business  in  Eng- 
land; and  that  he  must  have  a  thousand  dollars 
at  once  to  pay  his  urgent  debts.  He  was 
thoroughly  discouraged  and  sick.  As  he  lay  in 
the  Massachusetts  General  Hospital,  he  wrote  a 
cry  for  help  to  the  embattled  little  company  that 

[74] 


W.   II.    FORBES,   FIRST  PRESIDENT  OF  BELL  TELEPHONE  COMPANY 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

was  making  its  desperate  fight  to  protect  his 
patents.  "Thousands  of  telephones  are  now  in 
operation  in  all  parts  of  the  country,"  he  said, 
"yet  I  have  not  yet  received  one  cent  from  my 
invention.  On  the  contrary,  I  am  largely  out  of 
pocket  by  my  researches,  as  the  mere  value  of  the 
profession  that  I  have  sacrificed  during  my  three 
years'  work,  amounts  to  twelve  thousand  dollars." 
Fortunately,  there  came,  in  almost  the  same 
mail  with  Bell's  letter,  another  letter  from  a 
young  Bostonian  named  Francis  Blake,  with  the 
good  news  that  he  had  invented  a  transmitter  as 
satisfactory  as  Edison's,  and  that  he  would  prefer 
to  sell  it  for  stock  instead  of  cash.  If  ever  a  man 
came  as  an  angel  of  light,  that  man  was  Francis 
Blake.  The  possession  of  his  transmitter  in- 
stantly put  the  Bell  Company  on  an  even  footing 
with  the  Western  Union,  in  the  matter  of 
apparatus.  It  encouraged  the  few  capitalists 
who  had  invested  money,  and  it  stirred  others  to 
come  forward.  The  general  business  situation 
had  by  this  time  become  more  settled,  and  in  four 
months  the  company  had  twenty-two  thousand 
telephones  in  use,  and  had  reorganized  into  the 

[75] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

National  Bell  Telephone  Company,  with  $850, 
000  capital  and  with  Colonel  Forbes  as  its  first 
President.  Forbes  now  picked  up  the  load  that 
had  been  carried  so  long  by  Sanders.  As  the  son 
of  an  East  India  merchant  and  the  son-in-law 
of  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  he  was  a  Bostonian 
of  the  Brahmin  caste.  He  was  a  big,  four- 
square man  who  was  both  popular  and  efficient; 
and  his  leadership  at  this  crisis  was  of  immense 
value. 

This  reorganization  put  the  telephone  business 
into  the  hands  of  competent  business  men  at  every 
point.  It  brought  the  heroic  and  experimental 
period  to  an  end.  From  this  time  onwards  the 
telephone  had  strong  friends  in  the  financial 
world.  It  was  being  attacked  by  the  Western 
Union  and  by  rival  inventors  who  were  jealous 
of  Bell's  achievement.  It  was  being  half-starved 
by  cheap  rates  and  crippled  by  clumsy  apparatus. 
It  was  being  abused  and  grumbled  at  by  an 
impatient  public.  But  the  art  of  making  and 
marketing  it  had  at  last  been  built  up  into  a  com- 
mercial enterprise.  It  was  now  a  business,  fight- 
ing for  its  life. 

[76] 


CHAPTER  III 

THE   HOLDING   OF   THE   BUSINESS 

•  ,iQR  seventeen  months  no  one  disputed  Bell's 
•*•  claim  to  be  the  original  inventor  of  the 
telephone.  All  the  honor,  such  as  it  was,  had 
been  given  to  him  freely,  and  no  one  came  for- 
ward to  say  that  it  was  not  rightfully  his.  No 
one,  so  far  as  we  know,  had  any  strong  desire  to 
do  so.  No  one  conceived  that  the  telephone 
would  ever  be  any  more  than  a  whimsical  oddity 
of  science.  It  was  so  new,  so  unexpected,  that 
from  Lord  Kelvin  down  to  the  messenger  boys 
in  the  telegraph  offices,  it  was  an  incomprehen- 
sible surprise.  But  after  Bell  had  explained  his 
invention  in  public  lectures  before  more  than 
twenty  thousand  people,  after  it  had  been  on  exhi- 
bition for  months  at  the  Philadelphia  Centennial, 
after  several  hundred  articles  on  it  had  appeared 
in  newspapers  and  scientific  magazines,  and  after 
actual  sales  of  telephones  had  been  made  in 

[77] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

various  parts  of  the  country,  there  began  to 
appear  such  a  succession  of  claimants  and  in- 
fringers  that  the  forgetful  public  came  to  believe 
that  the  telephone,  like  most  inventions,  was  the 
product  of  many  minds. 

Just  as  Morse,  who  was  the  sole  inventor  of  the 
American  telegraph  in  1837,  was  confronted  by 
sixty-two  rivals  in  1838,  so  Bell,  who  was  the  sole 
inventor  in  1876,  found  himself  two  years  later 
almost  mobbed  by  the  "Tichborne  claimants"  of 
the  telephone.  The  inventors  who  had  been  his 
competitors  in  the  attempt  to  produce  a  musical 
telegraph,  persuaded  themselves  that  they  had 
unconsciously  done  as  much  as  he.  Any  pos- 
sessor of  a  telegraphic  patent,  who  had  used 
the  common  phrase  "talking  wire,"  had  a  chance 
to  build  up  a  plausible  story  of  prior  invention. 
And  others  came  forward  with  claims  so  vague 
and  elusive  that  Bell  would  scarcely  have  been 
more  surprised  if  the  heirs  of  Goethe  had 
demanded  a  share  of  the  telephone  royalties  on 
the  ground  that  Faust  had  spoken  of  "making 
a  bridge  through  the  moving  air." 

This  babel  of  inventors  and  pretenders  amazed 
[78] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Bell  and  disconcerted  his  backers.  But  it  was  no 
more  than  might  have  been  expected.  Here  was 
a  patent  — "the  most  valuable  single  patent  ever 
issued" — and  yet  the  invention  itself  was  so 
simple  that  it  could  be  duplicated  easily  by  any 
smart  boy  or  any  ordinary  mechanic.  The  mak- 
ing of  a  telephone  was  like  the  trick  of  Columbus 
standing  an  egg  on  end.  Nothing  was  easier  to 
those  who  knew  how.  And  so  it  happened  that, 
as  the  crude  little  model  of  Bell's  original  tele- 
phone lay  in  the  Patent  Office  open  and  unpro- 
tected except  by  a  few  phrases  that  clever  lawyers 
might  evade,  there  sprang  up  inevitably  around 
it  the  most  costly  and  persistent  Patent  War  that 
any  country  has  ever  known,  continuing  for 
eleven  years  and  comprising  six  hundred  law- 
suits. 

The  first  attack  upon  the  young  telephone  busi- 
ness was  made  by  the  Western  Union  Telegraph 
Company.  It  came  charging  full  tilt  upon  Bell, 
driving  three  inventors  abreast  —  Edison,  Gray, 
and  Dolbear.  It  expected  an  easy  victory;  in 
fact,  the  disparity  between  the  two  opponents 
was  so  evident,  that  there  seemed  little  chance  of 

[79] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

a  contest  of  any  kind.  "The  Western  Union  will 
swallow  up  the  telephone  people,"  said  public 
opinion,  "just  as  it  has  already  swallowed  up  all 
improvements  in  telegraphy." 

At  that  time,  it  should  be  remembered,  the 
Western  Union  was  the  only  corporation  that  was 
national  in  its  extent.  It  was  the  most  powerful 
electrical  company  in  the  world,  and,  as  Bell 
wrote  to  his  parents,  "probably  the  largest 
corporation  that  ever  existed."  It  had  behind  it 
not  only  forty  millions  of  capital,  but  the  prestige 
of  the  Vanderbilts,  and  the  favor  of  financiers 
everywhere.  Also,  it  met  the  telephone  pioneers 
at  every  point  because  it,  too,  was  a  wire  com- 
pany. It  owned  rights-of-way  along  roads  and 
on  house-tops.  It  had  a  monopoly  of  hotels  and 
railroad  offices.  No  matter  in  what  direction  the 
Bell  Company  turned,  the  live  wire  of  the  West- 
ern Union  lay  across  its  path. 

From  the  first,  the  Western  Union  relied  more 
upon  its  strength  than  upon  the  merits  of  its  case. 
Its  chief  electrical  expert,  Frank  L.  Pope,  had 
made  a  six  months'  examination  of  the  Bell 
patents.  He  had  bought  every  book  in  the 

[80] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

United  States  and  Europe  that  was  likely  to 
have  any  reference  to  the  transmission  of  speech, 
and  employed  a  professor  who  knew  eight  lan- 
guages to  translate  them.  He  and  his  men 
ransacked  libraries  and  patent  offices;  they 
rummaged  and  sleuthed  and  interviewed;  and 
found  nothing  of  any  value.  In  his  final  report 
to  the  Western  Union,  Mr.  Pope  announced  that 
there  was  no  way  to  make  a  telephone  except 
Bell's  way,  and  advised  the  purchase  of  the  Bell 
patents.  "I  am  entirely  unable  to  discover  any 
apparatus  or  method  anticipating  the  invention  of 
Bell  as  a  whole,"  he  said;  "and  I  conclude  that 
his  patent  is  valid."  But  the  officials  of  the  great 
corporation  refused  to  take  this  report  seriously. 
They  threw  it  aside  and  employed  Edison,  Gray, 
and  Dolbear  to  devise  a  telephone  that  could  be 
put  into  competition  with  Bell's. 

As  we  have  seen  in  the  previous  chapter,  there 
now  came  a  period  of  violent  competition  which 
is  remembered  as  the  Dark  Ages  of  the  telephone 
business.  The  Western  Union  bought  out 
several  of  the  Bell  exchanges  and  opened  up  a 
lively  war  on  the  others.  As  befitting  its  size,  it 

[81] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

claimed  everything.  It  introduced  Gray  as  the 
original  inventor  of  the  telephone,  and  ordered 
its  lawyers  to  take  action  at  once  against  the  Bell 
Company  for  infringement  of  the  Gray  patent. 
This  high-handed  action,  it  hoped,  would  most 
quickly  bring  the  little  Bell  group  into  a  humble 
and  submissive  frame  of  mind.  Every  morning 
the  Western  Union  looked  to  see  the  white  flag 
flying  over  the  Bell  headquarters.  But  no  white 
flag  appeared.  On  the  contrary,  the  news  came 
that  the  Bell  Company  had  secured  two  eminent 
lawyers  and  were  ready  to  give  battle. 

The  case  began  in  the  Autumn  of  1878  and 
lasted  for  a  year.  Then  it  came  to  a  sudden  and 
most  unexpected  ending.  The  lawyer-in-chief  of 
the  Western  Union  was  George  Giff ord,  who  was 
perhaps  the  ablest  patent  attorney  of  his  day. 
He  was  versed  in  patent  lore  from  Alpha  to 
Omega;  and  as  the  trial  proceeded,  he  became 
convinced  that  the  Bell  patent  was  valid.  He 
notified  the  Western  Union  confidentially,  of 
course,  that  its  case  could  not  be  proven,  and  that 
"Bell  was  the  original  inventor  of  the  telephone." 
The  best  policy,  he  suggested,  was  to  withdraw 

[82] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

their  claims  and  make  a  settlement.  This  wise  ad- 
vice was  accepted,  and  the  next  day  the  white  flag 
was  hauled  up,  not  by  the  little  group  of  Bell 
fighters,  who  were  huddled  together  in  a  tiny, 
two-room  office,  but  by  the  mighty  Western 
Union  itself,  which  had  been  so  arrogant  when 
the  encounter  began. 

A  committee  of  three  from  each  side  was  ap- 
pointed, and  after  months  of  disputation,  a 
treaty  of  peace  was  drawn  up  and  signed.  By 
the  terms  of  this  treaty  the  Western  Union 
agreed  — 

(1)  To  admit  that  Bell  was  the  original  inventor. 

(2)  To  admit  that  his  patents  were  valid. 

(3)  To  retire  from  the  telephone  business. 

The  Bell  Company,  in  return  for  this  sur- 
render, agreed  — 

(1)  To  buy  the  Western  Union  telephone  system. 

(2)  To  pay  the  Western  Union  a  royalty  of  twenty 
per  cent  on  all  telephone  rentals. 

(3)  To  keep  out  of  the  telegraph  business. 

This  agreement,  which  was  to  remain  in  force 
for  seventeen  years,  was  a  master-stroke  of 
diplomacy  on  the  part  of  the  Bell  Company. 

[83] 


THE     HISTORY     OP     THE     TELEPHONE 

It  was  the  Magna  Charta  of  the  telephone.  It 
transformed  a  giant  competitor  into  a  friend.  It 
added  to  the  Bell  System  fifty-six  thousand  tele- 
phones in  fifty-five  cities.  And  it  swung  the 
valiant  little  company  up  to  such  a  pinnacle  of 
prosperity  that  its  stock  went  skyrocketing  until 
it  touched  one  thousand  dollars  a  share. 

The  Western  Union  had  lost  its  case,  for  sev- 
eral very  simple  reasons :  It  had  tried  to  operate 
a  telephone  system  on  telegraphic  lines,  a  plan 
that  has  invariably  been  unsuccessful;  it  had  a 
low  idea  of  the  possibilities  of  the  telephone  busi- 
ness ;  and  its  already  busy  agents  had  little  time  or 
knowledge  or  enthusiasm  to  give  to  the  new  enter- 
prise. With  all  its  power,  it  found  itself  out- 
fought by  this  compact  body  of  picked  men,  who 
were  young,  zealous,  well-handled,  and  protected 
by  a  most  invulnerable  patent. 

The  Bell  Telephone  now  took  its  place  with  the 
Telegraph,  the  Railroad,  the  Steamboat,  the 
Harvester,  and  the  other  necessities  of  a  civilized 
country.  Its  pioneer  days  were  over.  There 
was  no  more  ridicule  and  incredulity.  Every  one 
knew  that  the  Bell  people  had  whipped  the  West- 

[84] 


CHAUNCEY   SMITH 


UNIVERSITY 

OF 
-      ,FOR 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

ern  Union,  and  hastened  to  join  in  the  grand  Te 
Deum  of  applause.  Within  five  months  from 
the  signing  of  the  agreement,  there  had  to  be  a 
reorganization ;  and  the  American  Bell  Telephone 
Company  was  created,  with  six  million  dollars 
capital.  In  the  following  year,  1881,  twelve  hun- 
dred new  towns  and  cities  were  marked  on  the 
telephone  map,  and  the  first  dividends  were  paid 
-  $178,500.  And  in  1882  there  came  such  a  tele- 
phone boom  that  the  Bell  System  was  multiplied 
by  two,  with  more  than  a  million  dollars  of  gross 
earnings. 

At  this  point  all  the  earliest  pioneers  of  the 
telephone,  except  Vail,  pass  out  of  its  history. 
Thomas  Sanders  sold  his  stock  for  somewhat  less 
than  a  million  dollars,  and  presently  lost  most  of 
it  in  a  Colorado  gold  mine.  His  mother,  who  had 
been  so  good  a  friend  to  Bell,  had  her  fortune 
doubled.  Gardiner  G.  Hubbard  withdrew  from 
business  life,  and  as  it  was  impossible  for  a  man 
of  his  ardent  temperament  to  be  idle,  he  plunged 
into  the  National  Geographical  Society.  He  was 
a  Colonel  Sellers  whose  dream  of  millions  (for 
the  telephone)  had  come  true;  and  when  he  died, 

[85] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

in  1897,  he  was  rich  both  in  money  and  in  the 
affection  of  his  friends.  Charles  Williams,  in 
whose  workshop  the  first  telephones  were  made, 
sold  his  factory  to  the  Bell  Company  in  1881  for 
more  money  than  he  had  ever  expected  to  possess. 
Thomas  A.  Watson  resigned  at  the  same  time, 
finding  himself  no  longer  a  wage-worker  but  a 
millionaire.  Several  years  later  he  established  a 
shipbuilding  plant  near  Boston,  which  grew 
until  it  employed  four  thousand  workmen  and 
had  built  half  a  dozen  warships  for  the  United 
States  Navy. 

As  for  Bell,  the  first  cause  of  the  telephone 
business,  he  did  what  a  true  scientific  Bohemian 
might  have  been  expected  to  do;  he  gave  all  his 
stock  to  his  bride  on  their  marriage-day  and 
resumed  his  work  as  an  instructor  of  deaf-mutes. 
Few  kings,  if  any,  had  ever  given  so  rich  a  wed- 
ding present ;  and  certainly  no  one  in  any  country 
ever  obtained  and  tossed  aside  an  immense 
fortune  as  incidentally  as  did  Bell.  When  the 
Bell  Company  offered  him  a  salary  of  ten  thou- 
sand dollars  a  year  to  remain  its  chief  inventor, 
he  refused  the  offer  cheerfully  on  the  ground  that 

[86] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

he  could  not  "invent  to  order."  In  1880,  the 
French  Government  gave  him  the  Volta  Prize  of 
fifty  thousand  francs  and  the  Cross  of  the  Legion 
of  Honor.  He  has  had  many  honors  since  then, 
and  many  interests.  He  has  been  for  thirty 
years  one  of  the  most  brilliant  and  picturesque 
personalities  in  American  public  life.  But  none 
of  his  later  achievements  can  in  any  degree  com- 
pare with  what  he  did  in  a  cellar  in  Salem,  at 
twenty-eight  years  of  age. 

They  had  all  become  rich,  these  first  friends 
of  the  telephone,  but  not  fabulously  so.  There 
was  not  at  that  time,  nor  has  there  been  since, 
any  one  who  became  a  multimillionaire  by  the  sale 
of  telephone  service.  If  the  Bell  Company  had 
sold  its  stock  at  the  highest  price  reached,  in  1880, 
it  would  have  received  less  than  nine  million 
dollars  —  a  huge  sum,  but  not  too  much  to  pay 
for  the  invention  of  the  telephone  and  the  build- 
ing up  of  a  new  art  and  a  new  industry.  It 
was  not  as  much  as  the  value  of  the  eggs  laid 
during  the  last  twelve  months  by  the  hens  of 
Iowa. 

But,  as  may  be  imagined,  when  the  news  of  the 
[87] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

Western  Union  agreement  became  known,  the 
story  of  the  telephone  became  a  fairy  tale  of  suc- 
cess. Theodore  Vail  was  given  a  banquet  by  his 
old-time  friends  in  the  Washington  postal  service, 
and  toasted  as  "the  Monte  Cristo  of  the  Tele- 
phone." It  was  said  that  the  actual  cost  of  the 
Bell  plant  was  only  one-twenty-fifth  of  its  capital, 
and  that  every  four  cents  of  investment  had  thus 
become  a  dollar.  Even  Jay  Gould,  carried  be- 
yond his  usual  caution  by  these  stories,  ran  up  to 
New  Haven  and  bought  its  telephone  company, 
only  to  find  out  later  that  its  earnings  were  less 
than  its  expenses. 

Much  to  the  bewilderment  of  the  Bell  Com- 
pany, it  soon  learned  that  the  troubles  of  wealth 
are  as  numerous  as  those  of  poverty.  It  was 
beset  by  a  throng  of  promoters  and  stock-jobbers, 
who  fell  upon  it  and  upon  the  public  like  a  swarm 
of  seventeen-year  locusts.  In  three  years,  one 
hundred  and  twenty-five  competing  companies 
were  started,  in  open  defiance  of  the  Bell  patents. 
The  main  object  of  these  companies  was  not,  like 
that  of  the  Western  Union,  to  do  a  legitimate 
telephone  business,  but  to  sell  stock  to  the  public. 

[88] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

The  face  value  of  their  stock  was  $225,000,000, 
although  few  of  them  ever  sent  a  message.  One 
company  of  unusual  impertinence,  without  money 
or  patents,  had  capitalized  its  audacity  at 
$15,000,000. 

How  to  hold  the  business  that  had  been  estab- 
lished —  that  was  now  the  problem.  None  of  the 
Bell  partners  had  been  mere  stock-jobbers.  At 
one  time  they  had  even  taken  a  pledge  not  to  sell 
any  of  their  stock  to  outsiders.  They  had 
financed  their  company  in  a  most  honest  and 
simple  way;  and  they  were  desperately  opposed 
to  the  financial  banditti  whose  purpose  was  to 
transform  the  telephone  business  into  a  cheat  and 
a  gamble.  At  first,  having  held  their  own  against 
the  Western  Union,  they  expected  to  make  short 
work  of  the  stock-jobbers.  But  it  was  a  vain 
hope.  These  bogus  companies,  they  found,  did 
not  fight  in  the  open,  as  the  Western  Union  had 
done. 

All  manner  of  injurious  rumors  were  presently 
set  afloat  concerning  the  Bell  patent.  Other 
inventors  —  some  of  them  honest  men,  and  some 
shameless  pretenders  —  were  brought  forward 

[89] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

with  strangely  concocted  tales  of  prior  invention. 
The  Granger  movement  was  at  that  time  a  strong 
political  factor  in  the  Middle  West,  and  its  blind 
fear  of  patents  and  "monopolies"  was  turned 
aggressively  against  the  Bell  Company.  A  few 
Senators  and  legitimate  capitalists  were  lifted  up 
as  the  figureheads  of  the  crusade.  And  a  loud 
hue-and-cry  was  raised  in  the  newspapers  against 
"high  rates  and  monopoly"  to  distract  the  minds 
of  the  people  from  the  real  issue  of  legitimate 
business  versus  stock-company  bubbles. 

The  most  plausible  and  persistent  of  all  the 
various  inventors  who  snatched  at  Bell's  laurels, 
was  Elisha  Gray.  He  refused  to  abide  by  the 
adverse  decision  of  the  court.  Several  years 
after  his  defeat,  he  came  forward  with  new 
weapons  and  new  methods  of  attack.  He  be- 
came more  hostile  and  irreconcilable ;  and  until  his 
death,  in  1901,  never  renounced  his  claim  to  be  the 
original  inventor  of  the  telephone. 

The  reason  for  this  persistence  is  very  evident. 
Gray  was  a  professional  inventor,  a  highly  com- 
petent man  who  had  begun  his  career  as  a  black- 
smith's apprentice,  and  risen  to  be  a  professor  of 

[90] 


JAMES  J.   STORROW 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

Oberlin.  He  made,  during  his  lifetime,  over  five 
million  dollars  by  his  patents.  In  1874,  he  and 
Bell  were  running  a  neck-and-neck  race  to  see 
who  could  first  invent  a  musical  telegraph  - 
when,  presto!  Bell  suddenly  turned  aside,  be- 
cause of  his  acoustical  knowledge,  and  invented 
the  telephone,  while  Gray  kept  straight  ahead. 
Like  all  others  who  were  in  quest  of  a  better 
telegraph  instrument,  Gray  had  glimmerings  of 
the  possibility  of  sending  speech  by  wire,  and  by 
one  of  the  strangest  of  coincidences  he  filed  a 
caveat  on  the  subject  on  the  same  day  that  Bell 
filed  the  application  for  a  patent.  Bell  had 
arrived  first.  As  the  record  book  shows,  the 
fifth  entry  on  that  day  was:  "A.  G.  Bell,  $15"; 
and  the  thirty-ninth  entry  was  "E.  Gray,  $10." 
There  was  a  vast  difference  between  Gray's 
caveat  and  Bell's  application.  A  caveat  is  a 
declaration  that  the  writer  has  not  invented  a 
thing,  but  believes  that  he  is  about  to  do  so ;  while 
an  application  is  a  declaration  that  the  writer  has 
already  perfected  the  invention.  But  Gray 
could  never  forget  that  he  had  seemed  to  be,  for 
a  time,  so  close  to  the  golden  prize;  and  seven 

[91] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

years  after  he  had  been  set  aside  by  the  Western 
Union  agreement,  he  reappeared  with  claims 
that  had  grown  larger  and  more  definite. 

When  all  the  evidence  in  the  various  Gray 
lawsuits  is  sifted  out,  there  appear  to  have  been 
three  distinctly  different  Grays:  first,  Gray  the 
scoffer,  who  examined  Bell's  telephone  at  the 
Centennial  and  said  it  was  "nothing  but  the  old 
lover's  telegraph.  It  is  impossible  to  make  a 
practical  speaking  telephone  on  the  principle 
shown  by  Professor  Bell.  .  .  .  The  currents 
are  too  feeble";  second,  Gray  the  convert,  who 
wrote  frankly  to  Bell  in  1877,  "I  do  not  claim 
the  credit  of  inventing  it";  and  third,  Gray  the 
claimant,  who  endeavored  to  prove  in  1886  that 
he  was  the  original  inventor.  His  real  position 
in  the  matter  was  once  well  and  wittily  described 
by  his  partner,  Enos  M.  Barton,  who  said:  "Of 
all  the  men  who  did  n't  invent  the  telephone, 
Gray  was  the  nearest." 

It  is  now  clearly  seen  that  the  telephone  owes 
nothing  to  Gray.  There  are  no  Gray  tele- 
phones in  use  in  any  country.  Even  Gray  him- 
self, as  he  admitted  in  court,  failed  when  he  tried 

[92] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

to  make  a  telephone  on  the  lines  laid  down  in  his 
caveat.  The  final  word  on  the  whole  matter  was 
recently  spoken  by  George  C.  Maynard,  who 
established  the  telephone  business  in  the  city  of 
Washington.  Said  Mr.  Maynard: 

"Mr.  Gray  was  an  intimate  and  valued  friend  of 
mine,  but  it  is  no  disrespect  to  his  memory  to  say 
that  on  some  points  involved  in  the  telephone  matter, 
he  was  mistaken.  No  subject  was  ever  so  thoroughly 
investigated  as  the  invention  of  the  speaking  telephone. 
No  patent  has  ever  been  submitted  to  such  determined 
assault  from  every  direction  as  Bell's ;  and  no  inventor 
has  ever  been  more  completely  vindicated.  Bell  was  the 
first  inventor,  and  Gray  was  not." 

After  Gray,  the  weightiest  challenger  who 
came  against  Bell  was  Professor  Amos  E. 
Dolbear,  of  Tufts  College.  He,  like  Gray,  had 
written  a  letter  of  applause  to  Bell  in  1877.  "I 
congratulate  you,  sir,"  he  said,  "upon  your  very 
great  invention,  and  I  hope  to  see  it  supplant  all 
forms  of  existing  telegraphs,  and  that  you  will  be 
successful  in  obtaining  the  wealth  and  honor 
which  is  your  due."  But  one  year  later,  Dolbear 
came  to  view  with  an  opposition  telephone.  It 
was  not  an  imitation  of  Bell's,  he  insisted,  but  an 

[93] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

improvement  upon  an  electrical  device  made  by  a 
German  named  Philip  Reis,  in  1861. 

Thus  there  appeared  upon  the  scene  the  so- 
called  "Reis  telephone,"  which  was  not  a  tele- 
phone at  all,  in  any  practical  sense,  but  which 
served  well  enough  for  nine  years  or  more  as  a 
weapon  to  use  against  the  Bell  patents.  Poor 
Philip  Reis  himself,  the  son  of  a  baker  in  Frank- 
fort, Germany,  had  hoped  to  make  a  telephone, 
but  he  had  failed.  His  machine  was  operated  by 
a  "make-and-break"  current,  and  so  could  not 
carry  the  infinitely  delicate  vibrations  made  by 
the  human  voice.  It  could  transmit  the  pitch  of 
a  sound,  but  not  the  quality.  At  its  best,  it 
could  carry  a  tune,  but  never  at  any  time  a 
spoken  sentence.  Reis,  in  his  later  years,  real- 
ized that  his  machine  could  never  be  used  for  the 
transmission  of  conversation;  and  in  a  letter  to  a 
friend  he  tells  of  a  code  of  signals  that  he  has 
invented. 

Bell  had  once,  during  his  three  years  of  ex- 
perimenting, made  a  Reis  machine,  although  at 
that  time  he  had  not  seen  one.  But  he  soon 
threw  it  aside,  as  of  no  practical  value.  As  a 

[94-] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

teacher  of  acoustics,  Bell  knew  that  the  one  indis- 
pensable requirement  of  a  telephone  is  that  it 
shall  transmit  the  whole  of  a  sound,  and  not 
merely  the  pitch  of  it.  Such  scientists  as  Lord 
Kelvin,  Joseph  Henry,  and  Edison  had  seen  the 
little  Reis  instrument  years  before  Bell  invented 
the  telephone;  but  they  regarded  it  as  a  mere 
musical  toy.  It  was  "not  in  any  sense  a  speak- 
ing telephone,"  said  Lord  Kelvin.  And  Edison, 
when  trying  to  put  the  Reis  machine  in  the  most 
favorable  light,  admitted  humorously  that  when 
he  used  a  Reis  transmitter  he  generally  "knew 
what  was  coming;  and  knowing  what  was  com- 
ing, even  a  Reis  transmitter,  pure  and  simple, 
reproduces  sounds  which  seem  almost  like  that 
which  was  being  transmitted;  but  when  the  man 
at  the  other  end  did  not  know  what  was  coming, 
it  was  very  seldom  that  any  word  was  recog- 
nized." 

In  the  course  of  the  Dolbear  lawsuit,  a  Reis 
machine  was  brought  into  court,  and  created 
much  amusement.  It  was  able  to  squeak,  but 
not  to  speak.  Experts  and  professors  wrestled 
with  it  in  vain.  It  refused  to  transmit  one  intel- 

[95] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

ligible  sentence.  "It  can  speak,  but  it  won't'' 
explained  one  of  Dolbear's  lawyers.  It  is  now 
generally  known  that  while  a  Reis  machine,  when 
clogged  and  out  of  order,  would  transmit  a  word 
or  two  in  an  imperfect  way,  it  was  built  on  wrong 
lines.  It  was  no  more  a  telephone  than  a  wagon 
is  a  sleigh,  even  though  it  is  possible  to  chain  the 
wheels  and  make  them  slide  for  a  foot  or  two. 
Said  Judge  Lowell,  in  rendering  his  famous 
decision: 

"A  century  of  Reis  would  never  have  produced  a 
speaking  telephone  by  mere  improvement  of  construc- 
tion. It  was  left  for  Bell  to  discover  that  the  failure 
was  due  not  to  workmanship  but  to  the  principle  which 
was  adopted  as  the  basis  of  what  had  to  be  done. 
.  .  .  Bell  discovered  a  new  art  —  that  of  transmit- 
ting speech  by  electricity,  and  his  claim  is  not  as  broad 
as  his  invention.  .  .  .  To  follow  Reis  is  to  fail; 
but  to  follow  Bell  is  to  succeed." 

After  the  victory  over  Dolbear,  the  Bell  stock 
went  soaring  skywards;  and  the  higher  it  went, 
the  greater  were  the  number  of  infringers  and 
blowers  of  stock  bubbles.  To  bait  the  Bell  Com- 
pany became  almost  a  national  sport.  Any  sort 
of  claimant,  with  any  sort  of  wild  tale  of  prior 

[96] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

invention,  could  find  a  speculator  to  support  him. 
On  they  came,  a  motley  array,  "some  in  rags, 
some  on  nags,  and  some  in  velvet  gowns/'  One 
of  them  claimed  to  have  done  wonders  with  an 
iron  hoop  and  a  file  in  1867;  a  second  had  a 
marvellous  table  with  glass  legs;  a  third  swore 
that  he  had  made  a  telephone  in  1860,  but  did  not 
know  what  it  was  until  he  saw  Bell's  patent ;  and 
a  fourth  told  a  vivid  story  of  having  heard  a  bull- 
frog croak  via  a  telegraph  wire  which  was  strung 
into  a  certain  cellar  in  Racine,  in  1851. 

This  comic  opera  phase  came  to  a  head  in  the 
famous  Drawbaugh  case,  which  lasted  for  nearly 
four  years,  and  filled  ten  thousand  pages  with 
its  evidence.  Having  failed  on  Reis,  the  Ger- 
man, the  opponents  of  Bell  now  brought  forward 
an  American  inventor  named  Daniel  Draw- 
baugh, and  opened  up  a  noisy  newspaper 
campaign.  To  secure  public  sympathy  for 
Drawbaugh,  it  was  said  that  he  had  invented  a 
complete  telephone  and  switchboard  before  1876, 
but  was  in  such  "utter  and  abject  poverty"  that 
he  could  not  get  himself  a  patent.  Five  hun- 
dred witnesses  were  examined;  and  such  a 

[97] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

general  turmoil  was  aroused  that  the  Bell  lawyers 
were  compelled  to  take  the  attack  seriously,  and 
to  fight  back  with  every  pound  of  ammunition 
they  possessed. 

The  fact  about  Drawbaugh  is  that  he  was  a 
mechanic  in  a  country  village  near  Harrisburg, 
Pennsylvania.  He  was  ingenious  but  not  inven- 
tive; and  loved  to  display  his  mechanical  skill 
before  the  farmers  and  villagers.  He  was  a  sub- 
scriber to  The  Scientific  American;  and  it  had 
become  the  fixed  habit  of  his  life  to  copy  other 
people's  inventions  and  exhibit  them  as  his  own. 
He  was  a  trailer  of  inventors.  More  than  forty 
instances  of  this  imitative  habit  were  shown  at 
the  trial,  and  he  was  severely  scored  by  the  judge, 
who  accused  him  of  "deliberately  falsifying  the 
facts."  His  ruling  passion  of  imitation,  appar- 
ently, was  not  diminished  by  the  loss  of  his  tele- 
phone clafms,  as  he  came  to  public  view  again  in 
1903  as  a  trailer  of  Marconi. 

Drawbaugh's  defeat  sent  the  Bell  stock  up 
once  more,  and  brought  on  a  Xerxes'  army  of 
opposition  which  called  itself  the  "Overland 
Company."  Having  learned  that  no  one  claim- 

[98] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

ant  could  beat  Bell  in  the  courts,  this  company 
massed  the  losers  together  and  came  forward 
with  a  scrap-basket  full  of  patents.  Several 
powerful  capitalists  undertook  to  pay  the 
expenses  of  this  adventure.  Wires  were  strung ; 
stock  was  sold;  and  the  enterprise  looked  for  a 
time  so  genuine  that  when  the  Bell  lawyers  asked 
for  an  injunction  against  it,  they  were  refused. 
This  was  as  hard  a  blow  as  the  Bell  people 
received  in  their  eleven  years  of  litigation;  and 
the  Bell  stock  tumbled  thirty-five  points  in  a  few 
days.  Infringing  companies  sprang  up  like 
gourds  in  the  night.  And  all  went  merrily  with 
the  promoters  until  the  Overland  Company  was 
thrown  out  of  court,  as  having  no  evidence, 
except  "the  refuse  and  dregs  of  former  cases  - 
the  heel-taps  found  in  the  glasses  at  the  end  of 
the  frolic." 

But  even  after  this  defeat  for  the  claimants, 
the  frolic  was  not  wholly  ended.  They  next 
planned  to  get  through  politics  what  they  could 
not  get  through  law;  they  induced  the  Gov- 
ernment to  bring  suit  for  the  annulment  of 
the  Bell  patents.  It  was  a  bold  and  desperate 

[99] 


THE      HISTORY      OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

move,  and  enabled  the  promoters  of  paper  com- 
panies to  sell  stock  for  several  years  longer. 
The  whole  dispute  was  re-opened,  from  Gray  to 
Drawbaugh.  Every  battle  was  re-fought;  and 
in  the  end,  of  course,  the  Government  officials 
learned  that  they  were  being  used  to  pull  tele- 
phone chestnuts  out  of  the  fire.  The  case  was 
allowed  to  die  a  natural  death,  and  was  infor- 
mally dropped  in  1896. 

In  all,  the  Bell  Company  fought  out  thirteen 
lawsuits  that  were  of  national  interest,  and  five 
that  were  carried  to  the  Supreme  Court  in  Wash- 
ington. It  fought  out  five  hundred  and  eighty- 
seven  other  lawsuits  of  various  natures ;  and  with 
the  exception  of  two  trivial  contract  suits,  it 
never  lost  a  case. 

Its  experience  is  an  unanswerable  indictment 
of  our  system  of  protecting  inventors.  No 
inventor  had  ever  a  clearer  title  than  Bell.  The 
Patent  Office  itself,  in  1884,  made  an  eighteen- 
months'  investigation  of  all  telephone  pat-  cs, 
and  reported:  "It  is  to  Bell  that  the  world  owes 
the  possession  of  the  speaking  telephone."  Yet 
his  patent  was  continuously  under  fire,  and  never 

[100] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

at  any  time  secure.  Stock  companies  whose 
paper  capital  totalled  more  than  $500,000,000 
were  organized  to  break  it  down ;  and  from  first 
to  last  the  success  of  the  telephone  was  based 
much  less  upon  the  monopoly  of  patents  than 
upon  the  building  up  of  a  well  organized 
business. 

Fortunately  for  Bell  and  the  men  who  upheld 
him,  they  were  defended  by  two  master-lawyers 
who  have  seldom,  if  ever,  had  an  equal  for  team 
work  and  efficiency  —  Chauncy  Smith  and  James 
J.  Storrow.  These  two  men  were  marvellously 
well  mated.  Smith  was  an  old-fashioned  at- 
torney of  the  Websterian  sort,  dignified,  pon- 
derous, and  impressive.  By  1878,  when  he  came 
in  to  defend  the  little  Bell  Company  against 
the  towering  Western  Union,  Smith  had  be- 
come the  most  noted  patent  lawyer  in  Boston. 
He  was  a  large,  thick-set  man,  a  reminder  of 
Benjamin  Franklin,  with  clean-shaven  face,  long 
hair  curling  at  the  ends,  frock  coat,  high  collar, 
and  beaver  hat. 

Storrow,  on  the  contrary,  was  a  small  man, 
quiet  in  manner,  conversational  in  argument,  and 

[101] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

an  encyclopaedia  of  definite  information.  He 
was  so  thorough  that,  when  he  became  a  Bell 
lawyer,  he  first  spent  an  entire  summer  at  his 
country  home  in  Petersham,  studying  the  laws 
of  physics  and  electricity.  He  was  never  in  the 
slightest  degree  spectacular.  Once  only,  during 
the  eleven  years  of  litigation,  did  he  lose  control 
of  his  temper.  He  was  attacking  the  credibility 
of  a  witness  whom  he  had  put  on  the  stand,  but 
who  had  been  tampered  with  by  the  opposition 
lawyers.  "But  this  man  is  your  own  witness," 
protested  the  lawyers.  "Yes,"  shouted  the 
usually  soft-speaking  Storrow;  "he  was  my  wit- 
ness, but  now  he  is  your  liar" 

The  efficiency  of  these  two  men  was  greatly 
increased  by  a  third  —  Thomas  D.  Lockwood, 
who  was  chosen  by  Vail  in  1879  to  establish  a 
Patent  Department.  Two  years  before,  Lock- 
wood  had  heard  Bell  lecture  in  Chickering  Hall, 
New  York,  and  was  a  "doubting  Thomas."  But 
a  closer  study  of  the  telephone  transformed  him 
into  an  enthusiast.  Having  a  memory  like  a 
filing  system,  and  a  knack  for  invention,  Lock- 
wood  was  well  fitted  to  create  such  a  depart- 

[102] 


THOMAS  D.  LOCKWOOD 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

merit.  He  was  a  man  born  for  the  place.  And 
he  has  seen  the  number  of  electrical  patents  grow 
from  a  few  hundred  in  1878  to  eighty  thousand 
in  1910. 

These  three  men  were  the  defenders  of  the  Bell 
patents.  As  Vail  built  up  the  young  telephone 
business,  they  held  it  from  being  torn  to  shreds 
in  an  orgy  of  speculative  competition.  Smith 
prepared  the  comprehensive  plan  of  defence. 
By  his  sagacity  and  experience  he  was  enabled  to 
mark  out  the  general  principles  upon  which  Bell 
had  a  right  to  stand.  Usually,  he  closed  the 
case,  and  he  was  immensely  effective  as  he  would 
declaim,  in  his  deep  voice:  "I  submit,  Your 
Honor,  that  the  literature  of  the  world  does  not 
afford  a  passage  which  states  how  the  human 
voice  can  be  electrically  transmitted,  previous  to 
the  patent  of  Mr.  Bell."  His  death,  like  his  life, 
was  dramatic.  He  was  on  his  feet  in  the  court- 
room, battling  against  an  infringer,  when,  in  the 
middle  of  a  sentence,  he  fell  to  the  floor,  over- 
come by  sickness  and  the  responsibilities  he  had 
carried  for  twelve  years.  Storrow,  in  a  different 
way,  was  fully  as  indispensable  as  Smith.  It 

[103] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

was  he  who  built  up  the  superstructure  of  the 
Bell  defence.  He  was  a  master  of  details.  His 
brain  was  keen  and  incisive;  and  some  of  his 
briefs  will  be  studied  as  long  as  the  art  of  tele- 
phony exists.  He  might  fairly  have  been  com- 
pared, in  action,  to  a  rapid-firing  Gatling  gun; 
while  Smith  was  a  hundred-ton  cannon,  and 
Lockwood  was  the  maker  of  the  ammunition. 

Smith  and  Storrow  had  three  main  arguments 
that  never  were,  and  never  could  be,  answered. 
Fifty  or  more  of  the  most  eminent  lawyers  of 
that  day  tried  to  demolish  these  arguments,  and 
failed.  The  first  was  Bell's  clear,  straightfor- 
ward story  of  how  he  did  it,  which  rebuked  and 
confounded  the  mob  of  pretenders.  The  second 
was  the  historical  fact  that  the  most  eminent  elec- 
trical scientists  of  Europe  and  America  had  seen 
Bell's  telephone  at  the  Centennial  and  had 
declared  it  to  be  new — "not  only  new  but 
marvellous,"  said  Tyndall.  And  the  third  was 
the  very  significant  fact  that  no  one  challenged 
Bell's  claim  to  be  the  original  inventor  of  the 
telephone  until  his  patent  was  seventeen 
months  old. 

[104] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

The  patent  itself,  too,  was  a  remarkable  docu- 
ment. It  was  a  Gibraltar  of  security  to  the  Bell 
Company.  For  eleven  years  it  was  attacked 
from  all  sides,  and  never  dented.  It  covered  an 
entire  art,  yet  it  was  sustained  during  its  whole 
lifetime.  Printed  in  full,  it  would  make  ten 
pages  of  this  book;  but  the  core  of  it  is  in  the  last 
sentence:  "The  method  of,  and  apparatus  for, 
transmitting  vocal  or  other  sounds  telegraphic- 
ally, by  causing  electrical  undulations,  similar  in 
form  to  the  vibrations  of  the  air  accompanying 
the  said  vocal  or  other  sounds"  These  words 
expressed  an  idea  that  had  never  been  written 
before.  It  could  not  be  evaded  or  overcome. 
There  were  only  thirty-two  words,  but  in  six 
years  these  words  represented  an  investment  of  a 
million  dollars  apiece. 

Now  that  the  clamor  of  this  great  patent  war 
has  died  away,  it  is  evident  that  Bell  received  no 
more  credit  and  no  more  reward  than  he 
deserved.  There  was  no  telephone  until  he 
made  one,  and  since  he  made  one,  no  one 
has  found  out  any  other  way.  Hundreds  of 
clever  men  have  been  trying  for  more  than 

[105] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

thirty  years  to  outrival  Bell,  and  yet  every 
telephone  in  the  world  is  still  made  on  the  plan 
that  Bell  discovered. 

No  inventor  who  preceded  Bell  did  more,  in 
the  invention  of  the  telephone,  than  to  help  Bell 
indirectly,  in  the  same  way  that  Fra  Mauro  and 
Toscanelli  helped  in  the  discovery  of  America 
by  making  the  map  and  chart  that  were  used  by 
Columbus.  Bell  was  helped  by  his  father,  who 
taught  him  the  laws  of  acoustics ;  by  Helmholtz, 
who  taught  him  the  influence  of  magnets  upon 
sound  vibrations;  by  Koenig  and  Leon  Scott, 
who  taught  him  the  infinite  variety  of  these  vibra- 
tions ;  by  Dr.  Clarence  J.  Blake,  who  gave  him  a 
human  ear  for  his  experiments;  and  by  Joseph 
Henry  and  Sir  Charles  Wheatstone,  who  en- 
couraged him  to  persevere.  In  a  still  more 
indirect  way,  he  was  helped  by  Morse's  invention 
of  the  telegraph;  by  Faraday's  discovery  of  the 
phenomena  of  magnetic  induction ;  by  Sturgeon's 
first  electro-magnet;  and  by  Volta's  electric  bat- 
tery. All  that  scientists  had  achieved,  from 
Galileo  and  Newton  to  Franklin  and  Simon 
Newcomb,  helped  Bell  in  a  general  way,  by  creat- 

[106] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

ing  a  scientific  atmosphere  and  habit  of  thought. 
But  in  the  actual  making  of  the  telephone,  there 
was  no  one  with  Bell  nor  before  him.  He 
invented  it  first,  and  alone. 


[107] 


F 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   DEVELOPMENT   OF   THE  ART 

OUR  wire-using  businesses  were  already  in 
the  field  when  the  telephone  was  born:  the 
fire-alarm,  burglar-alarm,  telegraph,  and  mes- 
senger-boy service;  and  at  first,  as  might  have 
been  expected,  the  humble  little  telephone  was 
huddled  in  with  these  businesses  as  a  sort  of  poor 
relation.  To  the  general  public,  it  was  a  mere 
scientific  toy;  but  there  were  a  few  men,  not 
many,  in  these  wire-stringing  trades,  who  saw  a 
glimmering  chance  of  creating  a  telephone  busi- 
ness. They  put  telephones  on  the  wires  that 
were  then  in  use.  As  these  became  popular,  they 
added  others.  Each  of  their  customers  wished 
to  be  able  to  talk  to  every  one  else.  And  so,  hav- 
ing undertaken  to  give  telephone  service,  they 
presently  found  themselves  battling  with  the  most 
intricate  and  baffling  engineering  problem  of 
modern  times  —  the  construction  around  the  tele- 

£108] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

phone  of  such  a  mechanism  as  would  bring  it  into 
universal  service. 

The  first  of  these  men  was  Thomas  A.  Watson, 
the  young  mechanic  who  had  been  hired  as  Bell's 
helper.  He  began  a  work  that  to-day  requires 
an  army  of  twenty-six  thousand  people.  He 
was  for  a  couple  of  years  the  total  engineering 
and  manufacturing  department  of  the  telephone 
business,  and  by  1880  had  taken  out  sixty  pat- 
ents for  his  own  suggestions.  It  was  Watson 
who  took  the  telephone  as  Bell  had  made  it,  really 
a  toy,  with  its  diaphragm  so  delicate  that  a  warm 
breath  would  put  it  out  of  order,  and  toughened 
it  into  a  more  rugged  machine.  Bell  had  used  a 
disc  of  fragile  gold-beaters'  skin  with  a  patch  of 
sheet-iron  glued  to  the  centre.  He  could  not  be- 
lieve, for  a  time,  that  a  disc  of  all-iron  would  vi- 
brate under  the  slight  influence  of  a  spoken  word. 
But  he  and  Watson  noticed  that  when  the  patch 
was  bigger  the  talking  was  better,  and  presently 
they  threw  away  the  gold-beaters'  skin  and  used 
the  iron  alone. 

Also,  it  was  Watson  who  spent  months  ex- 
perimenting with  all  sorts  and  sizes  of  iron  discs, 

[109] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

so  as  to  get  the  one  that  would  best  convey  the 
sound.  If  the  iron  was  too  thick,  he  discovered, 
the  voice  was  shrilled  into  a  Punch-and-Judy 
squeal;  and  if  it  was  too  thin,  the  voice  became 
a  hollow  and  sepulchral  groan,  as  if  the  speaker 
had  his  head  in  a  barrel.  Other  months,  too, 
were  spent  in  finding  out  the  proper  size  and 
shape  for  the  air  cavity  in  front  of  the  disc. 
And  so,  after  the  telephone  had  been  perfected 
in  principle  j  a  full  year  was  required  to  lift  it 
out  of  the  class  of  scientific  toys,  and  another 
year  or  two  to  present  it  properly  to  the  busi- 
ness world. 

Until  1878  all  Bell  telephone  apparatus  was 
made  by  Watson  in  Charles  Williams's  little 
shop  in  Court  Street,  Boston  —  a  building  long 
since  transformed  into  a  five-cent  theatre.  But 
the  business  soon  grew  too  big  for  the  shop. 
Orders  fell  five  weeks  behind.  Agents  stormed 
and  fretted.  Some  action  had  to  be  taken 
quickly,  so  licenses  were  given  to  four  other 
manufacturers  to  make  bells,  switchboards,  and 
so  forth.  By  this  time  the  Western  Electric 
Company  of  Chicago  had  begun  to  make  the 

[no] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

infringing  Gray-Edison  telephones  for  the  West- 
ern Union,  so  that  there  were  soon  six  groups 
of  mechanics  puzzling  their  wits  over  the  new 
talk-machinery. 

By  1880  there  was  plenty  of  telephonic  appa- 
ratus being  made,  but  in  too  many  different 
varieties.  Not  all  the  summer  gowns  of  that 
year  presented  more  styles  and  fancies,  The 
next  step,  if  there  was  to  be  any  degree  of  uni- 
formity, was  plainly  to  buy  and  consolidate  these 
six  companies;  and  by  1881  Vail  had  done  this. 
It  was  the  first  merger  in  telephone  history. 
It  was  a  step  of  immense  importance.  Had  it 
not  been  taken,  the  telephone  business  would 
have  been  torn  into  fragments  by  the  civil  wars 
between  rival  inventors. 

From  this  time  the  Western  Electric  became 
the  headquarters  of  telephonic  apparatus.  It 
was  the  Big  Shop,  all  roads  led  to  it.  No  mat- 
ter where  a  new  idea  was  born,  sooner  or  later 
it  came  knocking  at  the  door  of  the  Western 
Electric  to  receive  a  material  body.  Here  were 
the  skilled  workmen  who  became  the  hands  of 
the  telephone  business.  And  here,  too,  were 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

many  of  the  ablest  inventors  and  engineers,  who 
did  most  to  develop  the  cables  and  switchboards 
of  to-day. 

In  Boston,  Watson  had  resigned  in  1882,  and 
in  his  place,  a  year  or  two  later  stood  a  timely 
new  arrival  named  E.  T.  Gilliland.  This  really 
notable  man  was  a  friend  in  need  to  the  tele- 
phone. He  had  been  a  manufacturer  of  elec- 
trical apparatus  in  Indianapolis,  until  Vail's 
policy  of  consolidation  drew  him  into  the  central 
group  of  pioneers  and  pathfinders.  For  five 
years  Gilliland  led  the  way  as  a  developer  of 
better  and  cheaper  equipment.  He  made  the 
best  of  a  most  difficult  situation.  He  was  so 
handy,  so  resourceful,  that  he  invariably  found 
a  way  to  unravel  the  mechanical  tangles  that  per- 
plexed the  first  telephone  agents,  and  this,  too, 
without  compelling  them  to  spend  large  sums 
of  capital.  He  took  the  ideas  and  apparatus 
that  were  then  in  existence,  and  used  them  to 
carry  the  telephone  business  through  the  most 
critical  period  of  its  life,  when  there  was  little 
time  or  money  to  risk  on  experiments.  He  took 
the  peg  switchboard  of  the  telegraph,  for  in- 

[112] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

stance,  and  developed  it  to  its  highest  point,  to 
a  point  that  was  not  even  imagined  possible  by 
any  one  else.  It  was  the  most  practical  and 
complete  switchboard  of  its  day,  and  held  the 
field  against  all  comers  until  it  was  superseded 
by  the  modern  type  of  board,  vastly  more  elab- 
orate and  expensive. 

By  1884,  gathered  around  Gilliland  in  Bos- 
ton and  the  Western  Electric  in  Chicago,  there 
came  to  be  a  group  of  mechanics  and  high-school 
graduates,  very  young  men,  mostly,  who  had  no 
reputations  to  lose;  and  who,  partly  for  a  living 
and  mainly  for  a  lark,  plunged  into  the  difficulties 
of  this  new  business  that  had  at  that  time  little 
history  and  less  prestige.  These  young  adven- 
turers, most  of  whom  are  still  alive,  became  the 
makers  of  industrial  history.  They  were  un- 
questionably the  founders  of  the  present  science 
of  telephone  engineering. 

The  problem  that  they  dashed  at  so  light- 
heartedly  was  much  larger  than  any  of  them  im- 
agined. It  was  a  Gibraltar  of  impossibilities. 
It  was  on  the  face  of  it  a  fantastic  nightmare 
of  a  task  —  to  weave  such  a  web  of  wires,  with  in- 

[113] 


-THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

terlocking  centres,  as  would  put  any  one  tele- 
phone in  touch  with  every  other.  There  was  no 
help  for  them  in  books  or  colleges.  Watson,  who 
had  acquired  a  little  knowledge,  had  become  a 
shipbuilder.  Electrical  engineering,  as  a  pro- 
fession, was  unborn.  And  as  for  their  tele- 
graphic experience,  while  it  certainly  helped  them 
for  a  time,  it  started  them  in  the  wrong  direction 
and  led  them  to  do  many  things  which  had  after- 
wards to  be -undone. 

The  peculiar  electric  current  that  these  young 
pathfinders  had  to  deal  with  is  perhaps  the  quick- 
est, feeblest,  and  most  elusive  force  in  the  world. 
It  is  so  amazing  a  thing  that  any  description 
of  it  seems  irrational.  It  is  as  gentle  as  a  touch 
of  a  baby  sunbeam,  and  as  swift  as  the  lightning 
flash.  It  is  so  small  that  the  electric  current 
of  a  single  incandescent  lamp  is  greater  500,000,- 
000  times.  Cool  a  spoonful  of  hot  water  just 
olie  degree,  and  the  energy  set  free  by  the  cooling 
will  operate  a  telephone  for  ten  thousand  years. 
Catch  the  falling  tear-drop  of  a  child,  and  there 
will  be  sufficient  water-power  to  carry  a  spoken 
message  from  one  city  to  another. 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

Such  is  the  tiny  Genie  of  the  Wire  that  had 
to  be  protected  and  trained  into  obedience.  It 
was  the  most  defenceless  of  all  electric  sprites, 
and  it  had  so  many  enemies.  Enemies!  The 
world  was  populous  with  its  enemies.  There 
was  the  lightning,  its  elder  brother,  striking  at 
it  with  murderous  blows.  There  were  the  tele- 
graphic and  light-and-power  currents,  its  strong 
and  malicious  cousins,  chasing  and  assaulting  it 
whenever  it  ventured  too  near.  There  were  rain 
and  sleet  and  snow  and  every  sort  of  moisture, 
lying  in  wait  to  abduct  it.  There  were  rivers 
and  trees  and  flecks  of  dust.  It  seemed  as  if  all 
the  known  and  unknown  agencies  of  nature  were 
in  conspiracy  to  thwart  or  annihilate  this  gentle 
little  messenger  who  had  been  conjured  into  life 
by  the  wizardry  of  Alexander  Graham  Bell. 

All  that  these  young  men  had  received  from 
Bell  and  Watson  was  that  part  of  the  telephone 
that  we  call  the  receiver.  This  was  practically 
the  sum  total  of  Bell's  invention,  and  remains 
to-day  as  he  made  it.  It  was  then,  and  is  yet, 
the  most  sensitive  instrument  that  has  ever  been 
put  to  general  use  in  any  country.  It  opened 

[us] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

up  a  new  world  of  sound.  It  would  echo  the 
tramp  of  a  fly  that  walked  across  a  table,  or  re- 
peat in  New  Orleans  the  prattle  of  a  child  in 
New  York.  This  was  what  the  young  men  re- 
ceived, and  this  was  all.  There  were  no  switch- 
boards of  any  account,  no  cables  of  any  value,  no 
wires  that  were  in  any  sense  adequate,  no  theory 
of  tests  or  signals,  no  exchanges,  no  telephone 
system  of  any  sort  whatever. 

As  for  Bell's  first  telephone  lines,  they  were 
as  simple  as  clothes-lines.  Each  short  little  wire 
stood  by  itself,  with  one  instrument  at  each  end. 
There  were  no  operators,  switchboards,  or  ex- 
changes. But  there  had  now  come  a  time  when 
more  than  two  persons  wanted  to  be  in  the  same 
conversational  group.  This  was  a  larger  use  of 
the  telephone;  and  while  Bell  himself  had  fore- 
seen it,  he  had  not  worked  out  a  plan  whereby 
it  could  be  carried  out.  Here  was  the  new  prob- 
lem, and  a  most  stupendous  one  —  how  to  link 
together  three  telephones,  or  three  hundred,  or 
three  thousand,  or  three  million,  so  that  any  two 
of  them  could  be  joined  at  a  moment's  notice. 

And  that  was  not  all.     These  young  men  had 

[116] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

not  only  to  battle  against  mystery  and  "the 
powers  of  the  air";  they  had  not  only  to  protect 
their  tiny  electric  messenger,  and  to  create  a 
system  of  wire  highways  along  which  he  could 
run  up  and  down  safely;  they  had  to  do  more. 
They  had  to  make  this  system  so  simple  and 
fool-proof  that  every  one  —  every  one  except  the 
deaf  and  dumb  —  could  use  it  without  any  pre- 

r 

vious  experience.  They  had  to  educate  Bell's 
Genie  of  the  Wire  so  that  he  would  not  only  obey 
his  masters,  but  anybody  —  anybody  who  could 
speak  to  him  in  any  language. 

No  doubt,  if  the  young  men  had  stopped  to 
consider  their  life-work  as  a  whole,  some  of  them 
might  have  turned  back.  But  they  had  no  time 
to  philosophize.  They  were  like  the  boy  who 
learns  how  to  swim  by  being  pushed  into  deep 
water.  Once  the  telephone  business  was  started, 
it  had  to  be  kept  going;  and  as  it  grew,  there 
came  one  after  another  a  series  of  congestions. 
Two  courses  were  open;  either  the  business  had 
to  be  kept  down  to  suit  the  apparatus,  or  the 
apparatus  had  to  be  developed  to  keep  pace  with 
the  business.  The  telephone  men,  most  of  them, 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

at  least,  chose  development ;  and  the  brilliant  in- 
ventions that  afterwards  made  some  of  them 
famous  were  compelled  by  sheer  necessity  and 
desperation. 

The  first  notable  improvement  upon  Bell's 
invention  was  the  making  of  the  transmitter, 
in  1877,  by  Emile  Berliner.  This,  too,  was  a 
romance.  Berliner,  as  a  poor  German  youth  of 
nineteen,  had  landed  in  Castle  Garden  in  1870 
to  seek  his  fortune.  He  got  a  job  as  "a  sort 
of  bottle-washer  at  six  dollars  a  week,"  he  says, 
in  a  chemical  shop  in  New  York.  At  nights  he 
studied  science  in  the  free  classes  of  Cooper 
Union.  Then  a  druggist  named  Engel  gave 
him  a  copy  of  M tiller's  book  on  physics,  which 
was  precisely  the  stimulus  needed  by  his  crea- 
tive brain.  In  1876  he  was  fascinated  by  the 
telephone,  and  set  out  to  construct  one  on  a  dif- 
ferent plan.  Several  months  later  he  had  suc- 
ceeded and  was  overjoyed  to  receive  his  first 
patent  for  a  telephone  transmitter.  He  had  by 
this  time  climbed  up  from  his  bottle-washing  to 
be  a  clerk  in  a  drygoods  store  in  Washington ;  but 
he  was  still  poor  and  as  unpractical  as  most  in- 

[118] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

ventors.  Joseph  Henry,  the  Sage  of  the  Amer- 
ican scientific  world,  was  his  friend,  though  too 
old  to  give  him  any  help.  Consequently,  when 
Edison,  two  weeks  later,  also  invented  a  trans- 
mitter, the  prior  claim  of  Berliner  was  for  a 
time  wholly  ignored.  Later  the  Bell  Company 
bought  Berliner's  patent  and  took  up  his  side 
of  the  case.  There  was  a  seemingly  endless  suc- 
cession of  delays  —  fourteen  years  of  the  most 
vexatious  delays  —  until  finally  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States  ruled  that  Berliner, 
and  not  Edison,  was  the  original  inventor  of  the 
transmitter. 

From  first  to  last,  the  transmitter  has  been 
the  product  of  several  minds.  Its  basic  idea  is 
the  varying  of  the  electric  current  by  varying  the 
pressure  between  two  points.  Bell  unquestion- 
ably suggested  it  in  his  famous  patent,  when 
he  wrote  of  "increasing  and  diminishing  the  resis- 
tance." Berliner  was  the  first  actually  to  con- 
struct one.  Edison  greatly  improved  it  by 
using  soft  carbon  instead  of  a  steel  point.  A 
Kentucky  professor,  David  E.  Hughes,  started 
a  new  line  of  development  by  adapting  a  Bell 

[119] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

telephone  into  a  "microphone,"  a  fantastic  little 
instrument  that  would  detect  the  noise  made  by 
a  fly  in  walking  across  a  table.  Francis  Blake, 
of  Boston,  changed  a  microphone  into  a  prac- 
tical transmitter.  The  Rev.  Henry  Runnings, 
an  English  clergyman,  hit  upon  the  happy  idea 
of  using  carbon  in  the  form  of  small  granules. 
And  one  of  the  Bell  experts,  named  White,  im- 
proved the  Runnings  transmitter  into  its  pres- 
ent shape.  Both  transmitter  and  receiver  seem 
now  to  be  as  complete  an  artificial  tongue  and 
ear  as  human  ingenuity  can  make  them.  They 
have  persistently  grown  more  elaborate,  until  to- 
day a  telephone  set,  as  it  stands  on  a  desk,  con- 
tains as  many  as  one  hundred  and  thirty  separate 
pieces,  as  well  as  a  saltspoonful  of  glistening 
granules  of  carbon. 

Next  after  the  transmitter  came  the  problem 
of  the  mysterious  noises.  This  was,  perhaps,  the 
most  weird  and  mystifying  of  all  the  telephone 
problems.  The  fact  was  that  the  telephone  had 
brought  within  hearing  distance  a  new  wonder- 
world  of  sound.  All  wires  at  that  time  were 

[120] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

single,  and  ran  into  the  earth  at  each  end,  mak- 
ing what  was  called  a  "grounded  circuit."  And 
this  connection  with  the  earth,  which  is  really  a 
big  magnet,  caused  all  manner  of  strange  and 
uncouth  noises  on  the  telephone  wires. 

Noises!  Such  a  jangle  of  meaningless  noises 
had  never  been  heard  by  human  ears.  There 
were  spluttering  and  bubbling,  jerking  and  rasp- 
ing, whistling  and  screaming.  There  were  the 
rustling  of  leaves,  the  croaking  of  frogs,  the  hiss- 
ing of  steam,  and  the  flapping  of  birds'  wings. 
There  were  clicks  from  telegraph  wires,  scraps 
of  talk  from  other  telephones,  and  curious  little 
squeals  that  were  unlike  any  known  sound.  The 
lines  running  east  and  west  were  noisier  than  the 
lines  running  north  and  south.  The  night  was 
noisier  than  the  day,  and  at  the  ghostly  hour  of 
midnight,  for  what  strange  reason  no  one  knows, 
the  babel  was  at  its  height.  Watson,  who  had 
a  fanciful  mind,  suggested  that  perhaps  these 
sounds  were  signals  from  the  inhabitants  of  Mars 
or  some  other  sociable  planet.  But  the  matter- 
of-fact  young  telephonists  agreed  to  lay  the 

[121] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

blame  on  "induction" —  a  hazy  word  which  usu- 
ally meant  the  natural  meddlesomeness  of  elec- 
tricity. 

Whatever  else  the  mysterious  noises  were,  they 
were  a  nuisance.  The  poor  little  telephone  busi- 
ness was  plagued  almost  out  of  its  senses.  It 
was  like  a  dog  with  a  tin  can  tied  to  its  tail. 
No  matter  where  it  went,  it  was  pursued  by  this 
unearthly  clatter.  "We  were  ashamed  to 
present  our  bills,"  said  A.  A.  Adee,  one  of  the 
first  agents;  "for  no  matter  how  plainly  a  man 
talked  into  his  telephone,  his  language  was  apt  to 
sound  like  Choctaw  at  the  other  end  of  the  line." 

All  manner  of  devices  were  solemnly  tried  to 
hush  the  wires,  and  each  one  usually  proved  to 
be  as  futile  as  an  incantation.  What  was  to  be 
done?  Step  by  step  the  telephone  men  were 
driven  back.  They  were  beaten.  There  was  no 
way  to  silence  these  noises.  Reluctantly,  they 
agreed  that  the  only  way  was  to  pull  up  the  ends 
of  each  wire  from  the  tainted  earth,  and  join 
them  by  a  second  wire.  This  was  the  "metal- 
lic circuit"  idea.  It  meant  an  appalling  increase 
in  the  use  of  wire.  It  would  compel  the  rebuild- 

[122] 


J.  J.   CARTY 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

ing  of  the  switchboards  and  the  invention  of  new 
signal  systems.  But  it  was  inevitable;  and  in 
1883,  while  the  dispute  about  it  was  in  full  blast, 
one  of  the  young  men  quietly  slipped  it  into  use 
on  a  new  line  between  Boston  and  Providence. 
The  effect  was  magical.  "At  last,"  said  the  de- 
lighted manager,  "we  have  a  perfectly  quiet 
line." 

This  youg  man,  a  small,  slim  youth  who  was 
twenty-two  years  old  and  looked  younger,  was 
no  other  than  J.  J.  Carty,  now  the  first  of  tele- 
phone engineers  and  almost  the  creator  of  his 
profession.  Three  years  earlier  he  had  timidly 
asked  for  a  job  as  operator  in  the  Boston  ex- 
change, at  five  dollars  a  week,  and  had  shown 
such  an  aptitude  for  the  work  that  he  was  soon 
made  one  of  the  captains.  At  thirty  years  of  age 
he  became  a  central  figure  in  the  development  of 
the  art  of  telephony. 

What  Carty  has  done  is  known  by  telephone 
men  in  all  countries ;  but  the  story  of  Carty  him- 
self —  who  he  is,  and  why  —  is  new.  First  of  all, 
he  is  Irish,  pure  Irish.  His  father  had  left  Ire- 
land as  a  boy  in  1825.  During  the  Civil  War 

1 123  ] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

his  father  made  guns  in  the  city  of  Cambridge, 
where  young  John  Joseph  was  born;  and  after- 
wards he  made  bells  for  church  steeples.  He 
was  instinctively  a  mechanic  and  proud  of  his 
calling.  He  could  tell  the  weight  of  a  bell  from 
the  sound  of  it.  Moses  G.  Farmer,  the  elec- 
trical inventor,  and  Howe,  the  creator  of  the 
sewing-machine,  were  his  friends. 

At  five  years  of  age,  little  John  J.  Carty  was 
taken  by  his  father  to  the  shop  where  the  bells 
were  made,  and  he  was  profoundly  impressed  by 
the  magical  strength  of  a  big  magnet,  that  picked 
up  heavy  weights  as  though  they  were  feathers. 
At  the  high  school  his  favorite  study  was 
physics;  and  for  a  time  he  and  another  boy 
named  Rolfe  —  now  a  distinguished  man  of 
science  —  carried  on  electrical  experiments  of 
their  own  in  the  cellar  of  the  Rolfe  house.  Here 
they  had  a  "Tom  Thumb"  telegraph,  a  telephone 
which  they  had  ventured  to  improve,  and  a  hope- 
less tangle  of  wires.  Whenever  they  could  af- 
ford to  buy  more  wires  and  batteries,  they  went 
to  a  near-by  store  which  supplied  electrical 
apparatus  to  the  professors  and  students  of 

[124] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

Harvard.  This  store,  with  its  workshop  in  the 
rear,  seemed  to  the  two  boys  a  veritable  wonder- 
land ;  and  when  Carty,  a  youth  of  eighteen,  was 
compelled  to  leave  school  because  of  his  bad 
eyesight,  he  ran  at  once  and  secured  the  glori- 
ous job  of  being  boy-of -all- work  in  this  store  of 
wonders.  So,  when  he  became  an  operator  in 
the  Boston  telephone  exchange,  a  year  later,  he 
had  already  developed  to  a  remarkable  degree 
his  natural  genius  for  telephony. 

Since  then,  Carty  and  the  telephone  business 
have  grown  up  together,  he  always  a  little  dis- 
tance in  advance.  No  other  man  has  touched 
the  apparatus  of  telephony  at  so  many  points. 
He  fought  down  the  flimsy,  clumsy  methods, 
which  led  from  one  snarl  to  another.  He  found 
out  how  to  do  with  wires  what  Dickens  did  with 
words.  "Let  us  do  it  right,  boys,  and  then  we 
won't  have  any  bad  dreams" —  this  has  been  his 
motif.  And,  as  the  crown  and  climax  of  his 
work,  he  mapped  out  the  profession  of  telephone 
engineering  on  the  widest  and  most  compre- 
hensive lines. 

In  Carty,  the  engineer  evolved  into  the  edu- 

[125] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

cator.  His  end  of  the  American  Telephone  and 
Telegraph  Company  became  the  University  of 
the  Telephone.  He  was  himself  a  student  by 
disposition,  with  a  special  taste  for  the  writings 
of  Faraday,  the  forerunner;  Tyndall,  the  ex- 
pounder; and  Spencer,  the  philosopher.  And 
in  1890,  he  gathered  around  him  a  winnowed 
group  of  college  graduates  —  he  has  sixty  of 
them  on  his  staff  to-day  —  so  that  he  might  be- 
queath to  the  telephone  an  engineering  corps  of 
loyal  and  efficient  men. 

The  next  problem  that  faced  the  young  men 
of  the  telephone,  as  soon  as  they  had  escaped  from 
the  clamor  of  the  mysterious  noises,  was  the  neces- 
sity of  taking  down  the  wires  in  the  city  streets 
and  putting  them  underground.  At  first,  they 
had  strung  the  wires  on  poles  and  roof-tops. 
They  had  done  this,  not  because  it  was  cheap, 
but  because  it  was  the  only  possible  way,  so 
far  as  any  one  knew  in  that  kindergarten  period. 
A  telephone  wire  required  the  daintiest  of  han- 
dling. To  bury  it  was  to  smother  it,  to  make 
it  dull  or  perhaps  entirely  useless.  But  now 
that  the  number  of  wires  had  swollen  from  hun- 

[126] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

dreds  to  thousands,  the  overhead  method  had 
been  outgrown.  Some  streets  in  the  larger  cities 
had  become  black  with  wires.  Poles  had  risen 
to  fifty  feet  in  height,  then  sixty  —  seventy  - 
eighty.  Finally  the  highest  of  all  pole  lines  was 
built  along  West  Street,  New  York  —  every  pole 
a  towering  Norway  pine,  with  its  top  ninety  feet 
above  the  roadway,  and  carrying  thirty  cross- 
arms  and  three  hundred  wires. 

From  poles  the  wires  soon  overflowed  to  house- 
tops, until  in  New  York  alone  they  had  over- 
spread eleven  thousand  roofs.  These  roofs  had 
to  be  kept  in  repair,  and  their  chimneys  were 
the  deadly  enemies  of  the  iron  wires.  Many  a 
wire,  in  less  than  two  or  three  years,  was  with- 
ered to  the  merest  shred  of  rust.  As  if  these 
troubles  were  not  enough,  there  were  the  storms 
of  winter,  which  might  wipe  out  a  year's  revenue 
in  a  single  day.  The  sleet  storms  were  the 
worst.  Wires  were  weighted  down  with  ice, 
often  three  pounds  of  ice  per  foot  of  wire.  And 
so,  what  with  sleet,  and  corrosion,  and  the  cost 
of  roof-repairing,  and  the  lack  of  room  for  more 
wires,  the  telephone  men  were  between  the  devil 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

and  the  deep  sea  —  between  the  urgent  necessity 
of  burying  their  wires,  and  the  inexorable  fact 
that  they  did  not  know  how  to  do  it. 

Fortunately,  by  the  time  that  this  problem 
arrived,  the  telephone  business  was  fairly  well 
established.  It  had  outgrown  its  early  days  of 
ridicule  and  incredulity.  It  was  paying  wages 
and  salaries  and  even  dividends.  Evidently  it 
had  arrived  on  the  scene  in  the  nick  of  time  — 
after  the  telegraph  and  before  the  trolleys  and 
electric  lights.  Had  it  been  born  ten  years  later, 
it  might  not  have  been  able  to  survive.  So  del- 
icate a  thing  as  a  baby  telephone  could  scarcely 
have  protected  itself  against  the  powerful  cur- 
rents of  electricity  that  came  into  general  use  in 
1886,  if  it  had  not  first  found  out  a  way  of  hiding 
safely  underground. 

The  first  declaration  in  favor  of  an  under- 
ground system  was  made  by  the  Boston  company 
in  1880.  "It  may  be  expedient  to  place  our  en- 
tire system  underground,"  said  the  sorely  per- 
plexed manager,  "whenever  a  practicable  method 
is  found  of  accomplishing  it."  All  manner  of 
theories  were  afloat  but  Theodore  N.  Vail,  who 

[128] 


BROADWAY   AND  JOHN   STREET,    NEW  YORK,    IN    18SK),   SHOWING  THE 
DENSITY  OF  OVERHEAD   WIRES 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

was  usually  the  man  of  constructive  imagination 
in  emergencies,  began  in  1882  a  series  of  actual 
experiments  at  Attleborough,  Massachusetts,  to 
find  out  exactly  what  could,  and  what  could  not, 
be  done  with  wires  that  were  buried  in  the  earth. 

A  five-mile  trench  was  dug  beside  a  railway 
track.  The  work  was  done  handily  and  cheaply 
by  the  labor-saving  plan  of  hitching  a  locomotive 
to  a  plough.  Five  ploughs  were  jerked  apart 
before  the  work  was  finished.  Then,  into  this 
trench  were  laid  wires  with  every  known  sort 
of  covering.  Most  of  them,  naturally,  were 
wrapped  with  rubber  or  gutta-percha,  after  the 
fashion  of  a  submarine  cable.  When  all  were  in 
place,  the  willing  locomotive  was  harnessed  to  a 
huge  wooden  drag,  which  threw  the  ploughed 
soil  back  into  the  trench  and  covered  the  wires 
a  foot  deep.  It  was  the  most  professional  cable- 
laying  that  any  one  at  that  time  could  do,  and  it 
succeeded,  not  brilliantly,  but  well  enough  to 
encourage  the  telephone  engineers  to  go  ahead. 

Several  weeks  later,  the  first  two  cables  for 
actual  use  were  laid  in  Boston  and  Brooklyn; 
and  in  1883  Engineer  J.  P.  Davis  was  set  to 

[129] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

grapple  with  the  Herculean  labor  of  putting  a 
complete  underground  system  in  the  wire-bound 
city  of  New  York.  This  he  did  in  spite  of  a 
bombardment  of  explosions  from  leaky  gas- 
pipes,  and  with  a  woeful  lack  of  experts  and 
standard  materials.  All  manner  of  makeshifts 
had  to  be  tried  in  place  of  tile  ducts,  which  were 
not  known  in  1883.  Iron  pipe  was  used  at  first, 
then  asphalt,  concrete,  boxes  of  sand  and  creo- 
soted  wood.  As  for  the  wires,  they  were  first 
wrapped  in  cotton,  and  then  twisted  into  cables, 
usually  of  a  hundred  wires  each.  And  to  pre- 
vent the  least  taint  of  moisture,  which  means 
sudden  death  to  a  telephone  current,  these  ca- 
bles were  invariably  soaked  in  oil. 

This  oil-filled  type  of  cable  carried  the  tele- 
phone business  safely  through  half  a  dozen  years. 
But  it  was  not  the  final  type.  It  was  prelimi- 
nary only,  the  best  that  could  be  made  at  that 
time.  Not  one  is  in  use  to-day.  In  1885  Theo- 
dore Vail  set  on  foot  a  second  series  of  experi- 
ments, to  see  if  a  cable  could  be  made  that  was 
better  suited  as  a  highway  for  the  delicate  electric 
currents  of  the  telephone.  A  young  engineer 

[130] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

named  John  A.  Barrett,  who  had  already  made 
his  mark  as  an  expert,  by  finding  a  way  to  twist 
and  transpose  the  wires,  was  set  apart  to  tackle 
this  problem.  Being  an  economical  Vermonter, 
Barrett  went  to  work  in  a  little  wooden  shed  in 
the  backyard  of  a  Brooklyn  foundry.  In  this 
foundry  he  had  seen  a  unique  machine  that  could 
be  made  to  mould  hot  lead  around  a  rope  of 
twisted  wires.  This  was  a  notable  discovery. 
It  meant  tight  coverings.  It  meant  a  victory 
over  that  most  troublesome  of  enemies  —  mois- 
ture. Also,  it  meant  that  cables  could  hence- 
forth be  made  longer,  with  fewer  sleeves  and 
splices,  and  without  the  oil,  which  had  always 
been  an  unmitigated  nuisance. 

Next,  having  made  the  cable  tight,  Barrett 
set  out  to  produce  it  more  cheaply  and  by  ac- 
cident stumbled  upon  a  way  to  make  it  im- 
mensely more  efficient.  All  wires  were  at  that 
time  wrapped  with  cotton,  and  his  plan  was  to 
find  some  less  costly  material  that  would  serve 
the  same  purpose.  One  of  his  workmen,  a  Vir- 
ginian, suggested  the  use  of  paper  twine,  which 
had  been  used  in  the  South  during  the  Civil 

[131] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

War,  when  cotton  was  scarce  and  expensive. 
Barrett  at  once  searched  the  South  for  paper 
twine  and  found  it.  He  bought  a  barrel  of  it 
from  a  small  factory  in  Richmond,  but  after  a 
trial  it  proved  to  be  too  flimsy.  If  such  paper 
could  be  put  on  flat,  he  reasoned,  it  would  be 
stronger.  Just  then  he  heard  of  an  erratic 
genius  who  had  an  invention  for  winding  paper 
tape  on  wire  for  the  use  of  milliners. 

Paper- wound  bonnet-wire!  Who  could  im- 
agine any  connection  between  this  and  the  tele- 
phone? Yet  this  hint  was  exactly  what  Barrett 
needed.  He  experimented  until  he  had  devised 
a  machine  that  crumpled  the  paper  around  the 
wire,  instead  of  winding  it  tightly.  This  was  the 
finishing  touch.  For  a  time  these  paper-wound 
cables  were  soaked  in  oil,  but  in  1890  Engineer 
F.  A.  Pickernell  dared  to  trust  to  the  tightness 
of  the  lead  sheathing,  and  laid  a  "dry  core" 
cable,  the  first  of  the  modern  type,  in  one  of 
the  streets  of  Philadelphia.  This  cable  was  the 
event  of  the  year.  It  was  not  only  cheaper.  It 
was  the  best-talking  cable  that  had  ever  been 
harnessed  to  a  telephone. 

[132] 


BROADWAY   AND  JOHN   STREET,   NEW   YORK,   AS  IT  APPEARS 
WITHOUT  OVERHEAD  WIRES 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

What  Barrett  had  done  was  soon  made  clear. 
By  wrapping  the  wire  with  loose  paper,  he  had 
in  reality  cushioned  it  with  air,  which  is  the  best 
possible  insulator.  Not  the  paper,  but  the  air 
in  the  paper,  had  improved  the  cable.  More  air 
was  added  by  the  omission  of  the  oil.  And  pres- 
ently Barrett  perceived  that  he  had  merely  re- 
produced in  a  cable,  as  far  as  possible,  the 
conditions  of  the  overhead  wires,  which  are  sep- 
arated by  nothing  but  air. 

By  1896  there  were  two  hundred  thousand 
miles  of  wire  snugly  wrapped  in  paper  and  lying 
in  leaden  caskets  beneath  the  streets  of  the  cities ; 
and  to-day  there  are  six  million  miles  of  it  owned 
by  the  affiliated  Bell  companies.  Instead  of 
blackening  the  streets,  the  wire  nerves  of  the 
telephone  are  now  out  of  sight  under  the  road- 
way, and  twining  into  the  basements  of  buildings 
like  a  new  sort  of  metallic  ivy.  Some  cables  are 
so  large  that  a  single  spool  of  cable  will  weigh 
twenty-six  tons  and  require  a  giant  truck  and  a 
sixteen-horse  team  to  haul  it  to  its  resting-place. 
As  many  as  twelve  hundred  wires  are  often 
bunched  into  one  sheath,  and  each  cable  lies 

[183] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

loosely  in  a  little  duct  of  its  own.  It  is  reached 
by  manholes  where  it  runs  under  the  streets  and 
in  little  switching-boxes  placed  at  intervals  it 
is  frayed  out  into  separate  pairs  of  wires  that 
blossom  at  length  into  telephones. 

Out  in  the  open  country  there  are  still  the 
open  wires,  which  in  point  of  talking  are  the 
best.  In  the  suburbs  of  cities  there  are  neat 
green  posts  with  a  single  gray  cable  hung  from 
a  heavy  wire.  Usually,  a  telephone  pole  is  made 
from  a  sixty-year-old  tree,  a  cedar,  chestnut,  or 
juniper.  It  lasts  twelve  years  only,  so  that  the 
one  item  of  poles  is  still  costing  the  telephone 
companies  several  millions  a  year.  The  total 
number  of  poles  now  in  the  United  States,  used 
by  telephone  and  telegraph  companies,  once 
covered  an  area,  before  they  were  cut  down,  as 
large  as  the  State  of  Rhode  Island. 

But  the  highest  triumph  of  wire-laying  came 
when  New  York  swept  into  the  Skyscraper 
Age,  and  when  hundreds  of  tall  buildings,  as 
high  as  the  fall  of  the  waters  of  Niagara,  grew 
up  like  a  range  of  magical  cliffs  upon  the 
precious  rock  of  Manhattan.  Here  the  work  of 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

the  telephone  engineer  has  been  so  well  done  that 
although  every  room  in  these  cliff -buildings  has 
its  telephone,  there  is  not  a  pole  in  sight,  not  a 
cross-arm,  not  a  wire.  Nothing  but  the  tip-ends 
of  an  immense  system  are  visifol*.,  No  sooner 
is  a  new  skyscraper  walled  and  roofed,  than  the 
telephones  are  in  place,  at  once  putting  the  ten- 
ants in  touch  with  the  rest  of  the  city  and  the 
greater  part  of  the  United  States.  In  a  single 
one  of  these  monstrous  buildings,  the  Hudson 
Terminal,  there  is  a  cable  that  runs  from  base- 
ment to  roof  and  ravels  out  to  reach  three  thou- 
sand desks.  This  mighty  geyser  of  wires  is  fifty 
tons  in  weight  and  would,  if  straightened  out 
into  a  single  line,  connect  New  York  with 
Chicago.  Yet  it  is  as  invisible  as  the  nerves  and 
muscles  of  a  human  body. 

During  this  evolution  of  the  cable,  even  the 
wire  itself  was  being  remade.  Vail  and  others 
had  noticed  that  of  all  the  varieties  of  wire  that 
were  for  sale,  not  one  was  exactly  suitable  for 
a  telephone  system.  The  first  telephone  wire 
was  of  galvanized  iron,  which  had  at  least  the 
primitive  virtue  of  being  cheap.  Then  came 

[135] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

steel  wire,  stronger  but  less  durable.  But  these 
wires  were  noisy  and  not  good  conductors  of 
electricity.  An  ideal  telephone  wire,  they  found, 
must  be  made  of  either  silver  or  copper.  Silver 
was  out  of  iiba,  question,  and  copper  wire  was 
too  soft  and  weak.  It  would  not  carry  its  own 
weight. 

The  problem,  therefore,  was  either  to  make 
steel  wire  a  better  conductor,  or  to  produce  a 
copper  wire  that  would  be  strong  enough.  Vail 
chose  the  latter,  and  forthwith  gave  orders  to  a 
Bridgeport  manufacturer  to  begin  experiments. 
A  young  expert  named  Thomas  B.  Doolittle  was 
at  once  set  to  work,  and  presently  appeared  the 
first  hard-drawn  copper  wire,  made  tough- 
skinned  by  a  fairly  simple  process.  Vail  bought 
thirty  pounds  of  it  and  scattered  it  in  various 
parts  of  the  United  States,  to  note  the  effect 
upon  it  of  different  climates.  One  length  of 
it  may  still  be  seen  at  the  Vail  homestead  in 
Lyndonville,  Vermont.  Then  this  hard-drawn 
wire  was  put  to  a  severe  test  by  being  strung  be- 
tween Boston  and  New  York.  This  line  was  a 
brilliant  success,  and  the  new  wire  was  hailed 

[136] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

with  great  delight  as  the  ideal  servant  of  the 
telephone. 

Since  then  there  has  been  little  trouble  with 
copper  wire,  except  its  price.  It  was  four  times 
as  good  as  iron  wire,  and  four  times  as  expensive. 
Every  mile  of  it,  doubled,  weighed  two  hundred 
pounds  and  cost  thirty  dollars.  On  the  long 
lines,  where  it  had  to  be  as  thick  as  a  lead  pencil, 
the  expense  seemed  to  be  ruinously  great. 
When  the  first  pair  of  wires  was  strung  between 
New  York  and  Chicago,  for  instance,  it  was 
found  to  weigh  870,000  pounds  —  a  full  load  for 
a  twenty-two-car  freight  train;  and  the  cost  of 
the  bare  metal  was  $130,000.  So  enormous  has 
been  the  use  of  copper  wire  since  then  by  the  tele- 
phone companies,  that  fully  one-fourth  of  all 
the  capital  invested  in  the  telephone  has  gone  to 
the  owners  of  the  copper  mines. 

For  several  years  the  brains  of  the  telephone 
men  were  f ocussed  upon  this  problem  —  how  to 
reduce  the  expenditure  on  copper.  One  un- 
canny device,  which  would  seem  to  be  a  mere 
inventor's  fantasy  if  it  had  not  already  saved 
the  telephone  companies  four  million  dollars  or 

[1371 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

more,  is  known  as  the  "phantom  circuit."  It  en- 
ables three  messages  to  run  at  the  same  time, 
where  only  two  ran  before.  A  double  track  of 
wires  is  made  to  carry  three  talk-trains  running 
abreast,  a  feat  made  possible  by  the  whimsical 
disposition  of  electricity,  and  which  is  utterly 
inconceivable  in  railroading.  This  invention, 
which  is  the  nearest  approach  as  yet  to  multiple 
telephony,  was  conceived  by  Jacobs  in  England 
and  Carty  in  the  United  States. 

But  the  most  copper  money  has  been  saved 
—  literally  tens  of  millions  of  dollars  —  by  per- 
suading thin  wires  to  work  as  efficiently  as  thick 
ones.  This  has  been  done  by  making  better 
transmitters,  by  insulating  the  smaller  wires 
with  enamel  instead  of  silk,  and  by  placing  coils 
of  a  certain  nature  at  intervals  upon  the  wires. 
The  invention  of  this  last  device  startled  the  tele- 
phone men  like  a  flash  of  lightning  out  of  a  blue 
sky.  It  came  from  outside  —  from  the  quiet  lab- 
oratory of  a  Columbia  professor  who  had  arrived 
in  the  United  States  as  a  young  Hungarian  im- 
migrant not  many  years  earlier.  From  this 
professor,  Michael  J.  Pupin,  came  the  idea  of 

[138] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

"loading"  a  telephone  line,  in  such  a  way  as  to 
reinforce  the  electric  current.  It  enabled  a  thin 
wire  to  carry  as  far  as  a  thick  one,  and  thus 
saved  as  much  as  forty  dollars  a  wire  per  mile. 
As  a  reward  for  his  cleverness,  a  shower  of  gold 
fell  upon  Pupin,  and  made  him  in  an  instant  as 
rich  as  one  of  the  grand-dukes  of  his  native  land. 
It  is  now  a  most  highly  skilled  occupation, 
supporting  fully  fifteen  thousand  families,  to 
put  the  telephone  wires  in  place  and  protect  them 
against  innumerable  dangers.  This  is  the  pro- 
fession of  the  wire  chiefs  and  their  men,  a 
corps  of  human  spiders,  endlessly  spinning 
threads  under  streets  and  above  green  fields,  on 
the  beds  of  rivers  and  the  slopes  of  mountains, 
massing  them  in  cities  and  fluffing  them  out 
among  farms  and  villages.  To  tell  the  doings 
of  a  wire  chief,  in  the  course  of  his  ordinary 
week's  work,  would  in  itself  make  a  lively  book 
of  adventures.  Even  a  washerwoman,  with  one 
lone,  non-electrical  clothes-line  of  a  hundred 
yards  to  operate,  has  often  enough  trouble 
with  it.  But  the  wire  chiefs  of  the  Bell  tele- 
phone have  charge  of  as  much  wire  as  would 

[139] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

make  two  hundred  million  clothes-lines  —  ten 
apiece  to  every  family  in  the  United  States; 
and  these  lines  are  not  punctuated  with  clothes- 
pins, but  with  the  most  delicate  of  electrical 
instruments. 

The  wire  chiefs  must  detect  trouble  under  a 
thousand  disguises.  Perhaps  a  small  boy  has 
thrown  a  snake  across  the  wires  or  driven  a  nail 
into  a  cable.  Perhaps  some  self-reliant  citizen 
has  moved  his  own  telephone  from  one  room  to  an- 
other. Perhaps  a  sudden  rainstorm  has  splashed 
its  fatal  moisture  upon  an  unwiped  joint.  Or 
perhaps  a  submarine  cable  has  been  sat  upon  by 
the  Lusitania  and  flattened  to  death.  But  no 
matter  what  the  trouble,  a  telephone  system  can- 
not be  stopped  for  repairs.  It  cannot  be  picked 
up  and  put  into  a  dry-dock.  It  must  be  repaired 
or  improved  by  a  sort  of  vivisection  while  it  is 
working.  It  is  an  interlocking  unit,  a  living, 
conscious  being,  half  human  and  half  machine; 
and  an  injury  in  any  one  place  may  cause  a  pain 
or  sickness  to  its  whole  vast  body. 

And  just  as  the  particles  of  a  human  body 
change  every  six  or  seven  years,  without  disturb- 

[140] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

ing  the  body,  so  the  particles  of  our  telephone 
systems  have  changed  repeatedly  without  any 
interruption  of  traffic.  The  constant  flood  of 
new  inventions  has  necessitated  several  complete 
rebuildings.  Little  or  nothing  has  ever  been 
allowed  to  wear  out.  The  New  York  system 
was  rebuilt  three  times  in  sixteen  years;  and 
many  a  costly  switchboard  has  gone  to  the  scrap- 
heap  at  three  or  four  years  of  age.  What  with 
repairs  and  inventions  and  new  construction,  the 
various  Bell  companies  have  spent  at  least  $425,- 
000,000  in  the  first  ten  years  of  the  twentieth 
century,  without  hindering  for  a  day  the  cease- 
less torrent  of  electrical  conversation. 

The  crowning  glory  of  a  telephone  system  of 
to-day  is  not  so  much  the  simple  telephone  itself, 
nor  the  maze  and  mileage  of  its  cables,  but  rather 
the  wonderful  mechanism  of  the  Switchboard. 
This  is  the  part  that  will  always  remain  mysteri- 
ous to  the  public.  It  is  seldom  seen,  and  it  re- 
mains as  great  a  mystery  to  those  who  have  seen 
it  as  to  those  who  have  not.  Explanations  of 
it  are  futile.  As  well  might  any  one  expect  to 
learn  Sanscrit  in  half  an  hour  as  to  understand 

[141] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

a  switchboard  by  making  a  tour  of  investigation 
around  it.  It  is  not  like  anything  else  that  either 
man  or  Nature  has  ever  made.  It  defies  all 
metaphors  and  comparisons.  It  cannot  be 
shown  by  photography,  not  even  in  moving-pic- 
tures, because  so  much  of  it  is  concealed  inside 
its  wooden  body.  And  few  people,  if  any,  are 
initiated  into  its  inner  mysteries  except  those 
who  belong  to  its  own  cortege  of  inventors  and 
attendants. 

A  telephone  switchboard  is  a  pyramid  of  in- 
ventions. If  it  is  full-grown,  it  may  have  two 
million  parts.  It  may  be  lit  with  fifteen  thou- 
sand tiny  electric  lamps  and  nerved  with  as  much 
wire  as  would  reach  from  New  York  to  Berlin. 
It  may  cost  as  much  as  a  thousand  pianos  or  as 
much  as  three  square  miles  of  farms  in  Indiana. 
The  ten  thousand  wire  hairs  of  its  head  are  not 
only  numbered,  but  enswathed  in  silk,  and 
combed  out  in  so  marvellous  a  way  that  any  one 
of  them  can  in  a  flash  be  linked  to  any  other. 
Such  hair-dressing!  Such  puffs  and  braids  and 
ringlet  relays !  Whoever  would  learn  the  utmost 
that  may  be  done  with  copper  hairs  of  Titian 

[142] 


BACK  SECTION  OF  MODERN   SWITCHBOARD 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

red,  must  study  the  fantastic  coiffure  of  a  tele- 
phone Switchboard. 

If  there  were  no  switchboard,  there  would  still 
be  telephones,  but  not  a  telephone  system.  To 
connect  five  thousand  people  by  telephone  re- 
quires five  thousand  wires  when  the  wires  run 
to  a  switchboard;  but  without  a  switchboard 
there  would  have  to  be  12,497,500  wires — 4,999 
to  every  telephone.  As  well  might  there  be  a 
nerve-system  without  a  brain,  as  a  telephone 
system  without  a  switchboard.  If  there  had  been 
at  first  two  separate  companies,  one  owning  the 
telephone  and  the  other  the  switchboard,  neither 
could  have  done  the  business. 

Several  years  before  the  telephone  got  a 
switchboard  of  its  own,  it  made  use  of  the  boards 
that  had  been  designed  for  the  telegraph.  These 
were  as  simple  as  wheelbarrows,  and  became 
absurdly  inadequate  as  soon  as  the  telephone  busi- 
ness began  to  grow.  Then  there  came  adapta- 
tions by  the  dozen.  Every  telephone  manager 
became  by  compulsion  an  inventor.  There  was 
no  source  of  information  and  each  exchange  did 
the  best  it  could.  Hundreds  of  patents  were 

[143] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

taken  out.  And  by  1884  there  had  come  to  be 
a  fairly  definite  idea  of  what  a  telephone  switch- 
board ought  to  be. 

The  one  man  who  did  most  to  create  the  switch- 
board, who  has  been  its  devotee  for  more  than 
thirty  years,  is  a  certain  modest  and  little  known 
inventor,  still  alive  and  busy,  named  Charles  E. 
Scribner.  Of  the  nine  thousand  switchboard 
patents,  Scribner  holds  six  hundred  or  more. 
Ever  since  1878,  when  he  devised  the  first  "jack- 
knife  switch,"  Scribner  has  been  the  wizard  of 
the  switchboard.  It  was  he  who  saw  most  clearly 
its  requirements.  Hundreds  of  others  have 
helped,  but  Scribner  was  the  one  man  who  perse- 
vered, who  never  asked  for  an  easier  job,  and 
who  in  the  end  became  the  master  of  his  craft. 

It  may  go  far  to  explain  the  peculiar  genius 
of  Scribner  to  say  that  he  was  born  in  1858,  in 
the  year  of  the  laying  of  the  Atlantic  Cable ;  and 
that  his  mother  was  at  the  time  profoundly  inter- 
ested in  the  work  and  anxious  for  its  success. 
His  father  was  a  judge  in  Toledo;  but  young 
Scribner  showed  no  aptitude  for  the  tangles  of 
the  law.  He  preferred  the  tangles  of  wire,  and 

[144] 


CHARLES   E.   SCRIBNER,   TO   WHOM  THE  PERFECTION   OF  THE 
SWITCHBOARD    IS    LARGELY    DUE 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

as  a  boy  his  favorite  play-toy  was  a  telegraph 
system  in  miniature,  which  he  and  several  other 
boys  had  built  and  learned  to  operate.  These  boys 
had  a  benefactor  in  an  old  bachelor  named 
Thomas  Bond.  He  had  no  special  interest  in 
telegraphy.  He  was  a  dealer  in  hides.  But  he 
was  attracted  by  the  cleverness  of  the  boys  and 
gave  them  money  to  buy  more  wires  and  more 
batteries.  One  day  he  noticed  an  invention  of 
young  Scribner's  —  a  telegraph  repeater. 

"This  may  make  your  fortune,"  he  said,  "but 
no  mechanic  in  Toledo  can  make  a  proper  model 
of  it  for  you.  You  must  go  to  Chicago,  where 
telegraphic  apparatus  is  made."  The  boy  gladly 
took  his  advice  and  went  to  the  Western  Electric 
factory  in  Chicago.  Here  he  accidentally  met 
Enos  M.  Barton,  the  head  of  the  factory.  Bar- 
ton noted  that  the  boy  was  a  genius  and  offered 
him  a  job,  which  he  accepted  and  has  held  ever 
since.  Such  is  the  story  of  the  entrance  of 
Charles  E.  Scribner  into  the  telephone  business, 
where  he  has  been  well-nigh  indispensable. 

His  monumental  work  has  been  the  develop- 
ment of  the  Multiple  Switchboard,  a  much  more 

[145] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

brain-twisting  problem  than  the  building  of  the 
Pyramids  or  the  digging  of  the  Panama  Canal. 
The  earlier  types  of  switchboard  had  become  too 
cumbersome  by  1885.  They  were  well  enough 
for  five  hundred  wires  but  not  for  five  thousand. 
In  some  exchanges  as  many  as  half  a  dozen 
operators  were  necessary  to  handle  a  single  call ; 
and  the  clamor  and  confusion  were  becoming 
unbearable.  Some  handier  and  quieter  way  had 
to  be  devised,  and  thus  arose  the  Multiple  board. 
The  first  crude  idea  of  such  a  way  had  sprung 
to  life  in  the  brain  of  a  Chicago  man  named  L. 
B.  Firman,  in  1879;  but  he  became  a  farmer 
and  forsook  his  invention  in  its  infancy. 

In  the  Multiple  board,  as  it  grew  up  under  the 
hands  of  Scribner,  the  outgoing  wires  are  dupli- 
cated so  as  to  be  within  reach  of  every  operator. 
A  local  call  can  thus  be  answered  at  once  by  the 
operator  who  receives  it ;  and  any  operator  who  is 
overwhelmed  by  a  sudden  rush  of  business  can 
be  helped  by  her  companions.  Every  wire  that 
comes  into  the  board  is  tasselled  out  into  many 
ends,  and  by  means  of  a  "busy  test,"  invented  by 
Scribner,  only  one  of  these  ends  can  be  put 

[146] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

into  use  at  a  time.  The  normal  limit  of  such 
a  board  is  ten  thousand  wires,  and  will  always 
remain  so,  unless  a  race  of  long-armed  giantesses 
should  appear,  who  would  be  able  to  reach  over 
a  greater  expanse  of  board.  At  present,  a  busi- 
ness of  more  than  ten  thousand  lines  means  a 
second  exchange. 

The  Multiple  board  was  enormously  expen- 
sive. It  grew  more  and  more  elaborate  until  it 
cost  one-third  of  a  million  dollars.  The  tele- 
phone men  racked  their  brains  to  produce  some- 
thing cheaper  to  take  its  place,  and  they  failed. 
The  Multiple  boards  swallowed  up  capital  as  a 
desert  swallows  water,  but  they  saved  ten  sec- 
onds on  every  call.  This  was  an  unanswerable 
argument  in  their  favor,  and  by  1887  twenty- 
one  of  them  were  in  use. 

Since  then,  the  switchboard  has  had  three 
or  four  rebuildings.  There  has  seemed  to  be  no 
limit  to  the  demands  of  the  public  or  the  fertility 
of  Scribner's  brain.  Persistent  changes  were 
made  in  the  system  of  signalling.  The  first  sig- 
nal, used  by  Bell  and  Watson,  was  a  tap  on  the 
diaphragm  with  the  finger-nail.  Soon  after- 

[147] 


'THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

wards  came  a  "buzzer,"  and  then  the  magneto- 
electric  bell.  In  1887  Joseph  O'Connell,  of 
Chicago,  conceived  of  the  use  of  tiny  electric 
lights  as  signals,  a  brilliant  idea,  as  an  electric 
light  makes  no  noise  and  can  be  seen  either  by 
night  or  by  day.  In  1901,  J.  J.  Carty  invented 
the  "bridging  bell,"  a  way  to  put  four  houses  on 
a  single  wire,  with  a  different  signal  for  each 
house.  This  idea  made  the  "party  line"  prac- 
ticable, and  at  once  created  a  boom  in  the  use  of 
the  telephone  by  enterprising  farmers. 

In  1896  there  came  a  most  revolutionary 
change  in  switchboards.  All  things  were  made 
new.  Instead  of  individual  batteries,  one  at 
each  telephone,  a  large  common  battery  was  in- 
stalled in  the  exchange  itself.  This  meant  bet- 
ter signalling  and  better  talking.  It  reduced 
the  cost  of  batteries  and  put  them  in  charge  of 
experts.  It  established  uniformity.  It  intro- 
duced the  federal  idea  into  the  mechanism  of  a 
telephone  system.  Best  of  all,  it  saved  four 
seconds  on  every  call.  The  first  of  these  cen- 
tralizing switchboards  was  put  in  place  at  Phil- 
adelphia ;  and  other  cities  followed  suit  as  fast  as 

[148] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

they  could  afford  the  expense  of  rebuilding. 
Since  then,  there  have  come  some  switchboards 
that  are  wholly  automatic.  Few  of  these  have 
been  put  into  use,  for  the  reason  that  a  switch- 
board, like  a  human  body,  must  be  semi-automatic 
only.  To  give  the  most  efficient  service,  there 
will  always  need  to  be  an  expert  to  stand  between 
it  and  the  public. 

As  the  final  result  of  all  these  varying  changes 
in  switchboards  and  signals  and  batteries,  there 
grew  up  the  modern  Telephone  Exchange. 
This  is  the  solar  plexus  of  the  telephone  body. 
It  is  the  vital  spot.  It  is  the  home  of  the  switch- 
board. It  is  not  any  one's  invention,  as  the 
telephone  was.  It  is  a  growing  mechanism  that 
is  not  yet  finished,  and  may  never  be;  but  it  has 
already  evolved  far  enough  to  be  one  of  the 
wonders  of  the  electrical  world.  There  is  prob- 
ably no  other  part  of  an  American  city's  equip- 
ment that  is  as  sensitive  and  efficient  as  a 
telephone  exchange. 

The  idea  of  the  exchange  is  somewhat  older 
than  the  idea  of  the  telephone  itself.  There  were 
communication  exchanges  before  the  invention 

[149] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

of  the  telephone.  Thomas  B.  Doolittle  had  one 
in  Bridgeport,  using  telegraph  instruments, 
Thomas  B.  A.  David  had  one  in  Pittsburg,  using 
printing-telegraph  machines,  which  required 
little  skill  to  operate.  And  William  A.  Childs 
had  a  third,  for  lawyers  only,  in  New  York, 
which  used  dials  at  first  and  afterwards  print- 
ing machines.  These  little  exchanges  had  set 
out  to  do  the  work  that  is  done  to-day  by  the 
telephone,  and  they  did  it  after  a  fashion,  in  a 
most  crude  and  expensive  way.  They  helped 
to  prepare  the  way  for  the  telephone,  by  building 
up  small  constituencies  that  were  ready  for  the 
telephone  when  it  arrived. 

Bell  himself  was  perhaps  the  first  to  see  the 
future  of  the  telephone  exchange.  In  a  letter 
written  to  some  English  capitalists  in  1878,  he 
said:  "It  is  possible  to  connect  every  man's 
house,  office  or  factory  with  a  central  station,  so 
as  to  give  him  direct  communication  with  his 
neighbors.  ...  It  is  conceivable  that  cables 
of  telephone  wires  could  be  laid  underground,  or 
suspended  overhead,  connecting  by  branch  wires 
with  private  dwellings,  shops,  etc.,  and  uniting 

[150] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

them  through  the  main  cable  with  a  central 
office."  This  remarkable  prophecy  has  now  be- 
come stale  reading,  as  stale  as  Darwin's  "Ori- 
gin of  Species,"  or  Adam  Smith's  "Wealth  of 
Nations."  But  at  the  time  that  it  was  written  it 
was  a  most  fanciful  dream. 

When  the  first  infant  exchange  for  telephone 
service  was  born  in  Boston,  in  1877,  it  was  the 
tiny  offspring  of  a  burglar-alarm  business  oper- 
ated by  E.  T.  Holmes,  a  young  man  whose 
father   had   originated   the   idea   of   protecting 
property  by  electric  wires  in  1858.     Holmes  was 
the  first  practical  man  who  dared  to  offer  tele- 
phone service  for  sale.     He  had  obtained  two 
telephones,  numbers  six  and  seven,  the  first  five 
having  gone  to  the  junk-heap;  and  he  attached 
these  to  a  wire  in  his  burglar-alarm  office.     For 
two  weeks  his  business  friends  played  with  the 
telephones,  like  boys  with  a  fascinating  toy ;  then 
Holmes  nailed  up  a  new  shelf  in  his  office,  and  on 
this  shelf  placed  six  box-telephones  in  a  row. 
These  could  be  switched  into  connection  with  the 
burglar-alarm  wires  and  any  two  of  the  six  wires 
could  be  joined  by  a  wire  cord.     Nothing  could 

[151] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

have  been  simpler,  but  it  was  the  arrival  of  a 
new  idea  in  the  business  world. 

The  Holmes  exchange  was  on  the  top  floor  of 
a  little  building,  and  in  almost  every  other  city 
the  first  exchange  was  as  near  the  roof  as  possi- 
ble, partly  to  save  rent  and  partly  because  most 
of  the  wires  were  strung  on  roof-tops.  As  the 
telephone  itself  had  been  born  in  a  cellar,  so  the 
exchange  was  born  in  a  garret.  Usually,  too, 
each  exchange  was  an  off-shoot  of  some  other 
wire-using  business.  It  was  a  medley  of  make- 
shifts. Almost  every  part  of  its  outfit  had  been 
made  for  other  uses.  In  Chicago  all  calls  came 
in  to  one  boy,  who  bawled  them  up  a  speaking- 
tube  to  the  operators.  In  another  city  a  boy  re- 
ceived the  calls,  wrote  them  on  white  alleys,  and 
rolled  them  to  the  boys  at  the  switchboard. 
There  was  no  number  system.  Every  one  was 
called  by  name.  Even  as  late  as  1880,  when 
New  York  boasted  fifteen  hundred  telephones, 
names  were  still  in  use.  And  as  the  first  tele- 
phones were  used  both  as  transmitters  and  re- 
ceivers, there  was  usually  posted  up  a  rule  that 

[152] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

was  highly  important:  "Don't  Talk  with  your 
Ear  or  Listen  with  your  Mouth." 

To  describe  one  of  those  early  telephone  ex- 
changes in  the  silence  of  a  printed  page  is  a 
wholly  impossible  thing.  Nothing  but  a  lan- 
guage of  noise  could  convey  the  proper  im- 
pression. An  editor  who  visited  the  Chicago 
exchange  in  1879  said  of  it:  "The  racket  is  al- 
most deafening.  Boys  are  rushing  madly  hither 
and  thither,  while  others  are  putting  in  or  taking 
out  pegs  from  a  central  framework  as  if  they 
were  lunatics  engaged  in  a  game  of  fox  and 
geese."  In  the  same  year  E.  J.  Hall  wrote 
from  Buffalo  that  his  exchange  with  twelve 
boys  had  become  "a  perfect  Bedlam."  By  the 
clumsy  methods  of  those  days,  from  two  to  six 
boys  were  needed  to  handle  each  call.  And 
as  there  was  usually  more  or  less  of  a  cat-and- 
dog  squabble  between  the  boys  and  the  public, 
with  every  one  yelling  at  the  top  of  his  voice, 
it  may  be  imagined  that  a  telephone  exchange 
was  a  loud  and  frantic  place. 

Boys,  as  operators,  proved  to  be  most  com- 

[153] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

plete  and  consistent  failures.  Their  sins  of 
omission  and  commission  would  fill  a  book. 
What  with  whittling  the  switchboards,  swearing 
at  subscribers,  playing  tricks  with  the  wires,  and 
roaring  on  all  occasions  like  young  bulls  of 
Bashan,  the  boys  in  the  first  exchanges  did  their 
full  share  in  adding  to  the  troubles  of  the  busi- 
ness. Nothing  could  be  done  with  them.  They 
were  immune  to  all  schemes  of  discipline.  Like 
the  mysterious  noises  they  could  not  be  con- 
trolled, and  by  general  consent  they  were  abol- 
ished. In  place  of  the  noisy  and  obstreperous 
boy  came  the  docile,  soft-voiced  girl. 

If  ever  the  rush  of  women  into  the  business 
world  was  an  unmixed  blessing,  it  was  when  the 
boys  of  the  telephone  exchanges  were  super- 
seded by  girls.  Here  at  its  best  was  shown  the 
influence  of  the  feminine  touch.  The  quiet 
voice,  pitched  high,  the  deft  fingers,  the  patient 
courtesy  and  attentiveness  —  these  qualities  were 
precisely  what  the  gentle  telephone  required  in 
its  attendants.  Girls  were  easier  to  train;  they 
did  not  waste  time  in  retaliatory  conversation; 

[154] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

they  were  more  careful;  and  they  were  much 
more  likely  to  give  "the  soft  answer  that  turneth 
away  wrath." 

A  telephone  call  under  the  boy  regime  meant 
Bedlam  and  five  minutes;  afterwards,  under  the 
girl  regime,  it  meant  silence  and  twenty  seconds. 
Instead  of  the  incessant  tangle  and  tumult,  there 
came  a  new  species  of  exchange  —  a  quiet,  tense 
place,  in  which  several  score  of  young  ladies  sit 
and  answer  the  language  of  the  switchboard 
lights.  Now  and  then,  not  often,  the  signal 
lamps  flash  too  quickly  for  these  expert  phonists. 
During  the  panic  of  1907  there  was  one  mad  hour 
when  almost  every  telephone  in  Wall  Street  re- 
gion was  being  rung  up  by  some  desperate  specu- 
lator. The  switchboards  were  ablaze  with  lights. 
A  few  girls  lost  their  heads.  One  fainted  and 
was  carried  to  the  rest-room.  But  the  others 
flung  the  flying  shuttles  of  talk  until,  in  a  single 
exchange  fifteen  thousand  conversations  had 
been  made  possible  in  sixty  minutes.  There  are 
always  girls  in  reserve  for  such  explosive  occa- 
sions, and  when  the  hands  of  any  operator  are 

[155] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

seen  to  tremble,  and  she  has  a  warning  red  spot 
on  each  cheek,  she  is  taken  off  and  given  a  recess 
until  she  recovers  her  poise. 

These  telephone  girls  are  the  human  part  of  a 
great  communication  machine.  They  are  weav- 
ing a  web  of  talk  that  changes  into  a  new 
pattern  every  minute.  How  many  possible  com- 
binations there  are  with  the  five  million  tele- 
phones of  the  Bell  System,  or  what  unthinkable 
mileage  of  conversation,  no  one  has  ever  dared 
to  guess.  But  whoever  has  once  seen  the  long 
line  of  white  arms  waving  back  and  forth  in  front 
of  the  switchboard  lights  must  feel  that  he  has 
looked  upon  the  very  pulse  of  the  city's  life. 

In  1902  the  New  York  Telephone  Company 
started  a  school,  the  first  of  its  kind  in  the  world, 
for  the  education  of  these  telephone  girls.  This 
school  is  hidden  amid  ranges  of  skyscrapers,  but 
seventeen  thousand  girls  discover  it  in  the  course 
of  the  year.  It  is  a  most  particular  and  exclu- 
sive school.  It  accepts  fewer  than  two  thousand 
of  these  girls,  and  rejects  over  fifteen  thousand. 
Not  more  than  one  girl  in  every  eight  can  meas- 
ure up  to  its  standards ;  and  it  cheerfully  refuses 

[156] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

as  many  students  in  a  year  as  would  make  three 
Yales  or  Harvards. 

This  school  is  unique,  too,  in  the  fact  that  it 
charges  no  fees,  pays  every  student  five  dollars  a 
week,  and  then  provides  her  with  a  job  when  she 
graduates.  But  it  demands  that  every  girl  shall 
be  in  good  health,  quick-handed,  clear-voiced, 
and  with  a  certain  poise  and  alertness  of  manner. 
Presence  of  mind,  which,  in  Herbert  Spencer's 
opinion,  ought  to  be  taught  in  every  university, 
is  in  various  ways  drilled  into  the  temperament  of 
the  telephone  girl.  She  is  also  taught  the  knack 
of  concentration,  so  that  she  may  carry  the 
switchboard  situation  in  her  head,  as  a  chess- 
player carries  in  his  head  the  arrangement  of  the 
chess-men.  And  she  is  much  more  welcome  at 
this  strange  school  if  she  is  young  and  has  never 
worked  in  other  trades,  where  less  speed  and 
vigilance  are  required. 

No  matter  how  many  millions  of  dollars  may 
be  spent  upon  cables  and  switchboards,  the  qual- 
ity of  telephone  service  depends  upon  the  girl  at 
the  exchange  end  of  the  wire.  It  is  she  who 
meets  the  public  at  every  point.  She  is  the  de- 

[157] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

spatcher  of  all  the  talk  trains;  she  is  the  ruler 
of  the  wire  highways ;  and  she  is  expected  to  give 
every  passenger-voice  an  instantaneous  express 
to  its  destination.  More  is  demanded  from  her 
than  from  any  other  servant  of  the  public.  Her 
clients  refuse  to  stand  in  line  and  quietly  wait 
their  turn,  as  they  are  quite  willing  to  do  in 
stores  and  theatres  and  barber  shops  and  railway 
stations  and  everywhere  else.  They  do  not  see 
her  at  work  and  they  do  not  know  what  her  work 
is.  They  do  not  notice  that  she  answers  a  call  in 
an  average  time  of  three  and  a  half  seconds. 
They  are  in  a  hurry,  or  they  would  not  be  at  the 
telephone;  and  each  second  is  a  minute  long. 
Any  delay  is  a  direct  personal  affront  that  makes 
a  vivid  impression  upon  their  minds.  And  they 
are  not  apt  to  remember  that  most  of  the  delays 
and  blunders  are  being  made,  not  by  the  expert 
girls,  but  by  the  careless  people  who  persist  in 
calling  wrong  numbers  and  in  ignoring  the  nice- 
ties of  telephone  etiquette. 

The  truth  about  the  American  telephone  girl 
is  that  she  has  become  so  highly  efficient  that  we 
now  expect  her  to  be  a  paragon  of  perfection. 

[158] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

To  give  the  young  lady  her  due,  we  must  ac- 
knowledge that  she  has  done  more  than  any 
other  person  to  introduce  courtesy  into  the  busi- 
ness world.  She  has  done  most  to  abolish  the 
old-time  roughness  and  vulgarity.  She  has 
made  big  business  to  run  more  smoothly  than 
little  business  did,  half  a  century  ago.  She  has 
shown  us  how  to  take  the  friction  out  of  conversa- 
tion, and  taught  us  refinements  of  politeness 
which  were  rare  even  among  the  Beau  Brummels 
of  pre-telephonic  days.  Who,  for  instance,  until 
the  arrival  of  the  telephone  girl,  appreciated  the 
difference  between  "Who  are  you?"  and  "Who 
is  this?"  Or  who  else  has  so  impressed  upon  us 
the  value  of  the  rising  inflection,  as  a  gentler 
habit  of  speech?  This  propaganda  of  politeness 
has  gone  so  far  that  to-day  the  man  who  is  pro- 
fane or  abusive  at  the  telephone,  is  cut  off  from 
the  use  of  it.  He  is  cast  out  as  unfit  for  a  tele- 
phone-using community. 

And  now,  so  that  there  shall  be  no  anti- 
climax in  this  story  of  telephone  development, 
we  must  turn  the  spot-light  upon  that  immense 
aggregation  of  workshops  in  which  have  been 

[159] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

made  three-fifths  of  the  telephone  apparatus  of 
the  world  —  the  Western  Electric.  The  mother 
factory  of  this  globe-trotting  business  is  the  big- 
gest thing  in  the  spacious  back-yard  of  Chicago ; 
and  there  are  eleven  smaller  factories  —  her 
children  —  scattered  over  the  earth  from  New 
York  to  Tokio.  To  put  its  totals  into  a  sentence, 
it  is  an  enterprise  of  26,000-man-power,  and 
40,000,000-dollar-power ;  and  the  telephonic 
goods  that  it  produces  in  half  a  day  are  worth 
one  hundred  thousand  dollars  —  as  much,  by 
the  way,  as  the  Western  Union  refused  to  pay 
for  the  Bell  patents  in  1877. 

The  Western  Electric  was  born  in  Chicago, 
in  the  ashes  of  the  big  fire  of  1871;  and  it  has 
grown  up  to  its  present  greatness  quietly,  without 
celebrating  its  birthdays.  At  first  it  had  no  tele- 
phones to  make.  None  had  been  invented,  so 
it  made  telegraphic  apparatus,  burglar-alarms, 
electric  pens,  and  other  such  things.  But  in  1878, 
when  the  Western  Union  made  its  short-lived 
attempt  to  compete  with  the  Bell  Company,  the 
Western  Electric  agreed  to  make  its  telephones. 
Three  years  later,  when  the  brief  spasm  of 

[160] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

competition  was  ended,  the  Western  Electric 
was  taken  in  hand  by  the  Bell  people  and  has 
since  then  remained  the  great  workshop  of  the 
telephone. 

The  main  plant  in  Chicago  is  not  especially 
remarkable  from  a  manufacturing  point  of 
view.  Here  are  the  inevitable  lumber-yards 
and  foundries  and  machine-shops.  Here  is 
the  mad  waltz  of  the  spindles  that  whirl  silk 
and  cotton  threads  around  the  copper  wires, 
very  similar  to  what  may  be  seen  in  any  braid 
factory.  Here  electric  lamps  are  made,  five 
thousand  of  them  in  a  day,  in  the  same  manner 
as  elsewhere,  except  that  here  they  are  so  small 
and  dainty  as  to  seem  designed  for  fairy  palaces. 

The  things  that  are  done  with  wire  in  the 
Western  Electric  factories  are  too  many  for 
any  mere  outsider  to  remember.  Some  wire 
is  wrapped  with  paper  tape  at  a  speed  of 
nine  thousand  miles  a  day.  Some  is  fash- 
ioned into  fantastic  shapes  that  look  like 
absurd  sea-monsters,  but  which  in  reality  are 
only  the  nerve  systems  of  switchboards.  And 
some  is  twisted  into  cables  by  means  of  a 

[161] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

dozen  whirling  drums  —  a  dizzying  sight,  as 
each  pair  of  drums  revolve  in  opposite  direc- 
tions. Because  of  the  fact  that  a  cable's  inevi- 
table enemy  is  moisture,  each  cable  is  wound 
on  an  immense  spool  and  rolled  into  an  oven 
until  it  is  as  dry  as  a  cinder.  Then  it  is  put 
into  a  strait- jacket  of  lead  pipe,  sealed  at  both 
ends,  and  trundled  into  a  waiting  freight  car. 

No  other  company  uses  so  much  wire  and 
hard  rubber,  or  so  many  tons  of  brass  rods,  as 
the  Western  Electric.  Of  platinum,  too,  which 
is  more  expensive  than  gold,  it  uses  one  thousand 
pounds  a  year  in  the  making  of  telephone  trans- 
mitters. This  is  imported  from  the  Ural  Moun- 
tains. The  silk  thread  comes  from  Italy  and 
Japan;  the  iron  for  magnets,  from  Norway; 
the  paper  tape,  from  Manila;  the  mahogany, 
from  South  America;  and  the  rubber,  from 
Brazil  and  the  valley  of  the  Congo.  At  least 
seven  countries  must  cooperate  to  make  a  tele- 
phone message  possible. 

Perhaps  the  most  extraordinary  feature  in 
the  Western  Electric  factories  is  the  multitude 
of  its  inspectors.  No  other  sort  of  manufactur- 

[162] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

ing,  not  even  a  Government  navy-yard,  has  so 
many.     Nothing  is  too  small  to  escape  these 
sleuths  of  inspection.     They  test  every  tiny  disc 
of  mica,  and  throw  away  nine  out  of  ten.     They 
test  every  telephone  by  actual  talk,  set  up  every 
switchboard,  and  try  out  every  cable.     A  single 
transmitter,  by  the  time  it  is  completed,  has  had 
to  pass  three  hundred  examinations ;  and  a  single 
coin-box  is  obliged  to  count  ten  thousand  nickels 
before  it  graduates  into  the  outer  world.     Seven 
hundred  inspectors  are  on  guard  in  the  two  main 
plants  at  Chicago  and  New  York.     This  is  a 
ruinously  large  number,  from  a  profit-making 
point  of  view;  but  the  inexorable  fact  is  that  in 
a  telephone  system  nothing  is  insignificant.     It 
is  built  on  such  altruistic  lines  that  an  injury  to 
any  one  part  is  the  concern  of  all. 

As  usual,  when  we  probe  into  the  history  of  a 
business  that  has  grown  great  and  overspread 
the  earth,  we  find  a  Man;  and  the  Western  Elec- 
tric is  no  exception  to  this  rule.  Its  Man,  still 
fairly  hale  and  busy  after  forty  years  of  leader- 
ship, is  Enos  M.  Barton.  His  career  is  the 
typical  American  story  of  self-help.  He  was  a 

[163] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

telegraph  messenger  boy  in  New  York  during 
the  Civil  War,  then  a  telegraph  operator  in 
Cleveland.  In  1869  his  salary  was  cut  down 
from  one  hundred  dollars  a  month  to  ninety  dol- 
lars ;  whereupon  he  walked  out  and  founded  the 
Western  Electric  in  a  shabby  little  machine-shop. 
Later  he  moved  to  Chicago,  took  in  Elisha  Gray 
as  his  partner,  and  built  up  a  trade  in  the  making 
of  telegraphic  materials. 

When  the  telephone  was  invented,  Barton  was 
one  of  the  sceptics.  "I  well  remember  my  dis- 
gust," he  said,  "when  some  one  told  me  it  was 
possible  to  send  conversation  along  a  wire." 
Several  months  later  he  saw  a  telephone  and  at 
once  became  one  of  its  apostles.  By  1882  his 
plant  had  become  the  official  workshop  of  the 
Bell  Companies.  It  was  the  headquarters  of 
invention  and  manufacturing.  Here  was  gath- 
ered a  notable  group  of  young  men,  brilliant  and 
adventurous,  who  dared  to  stake  their  futures 
on  the  success  of  the  telephone.  And  always 
at  their  head  was  Barton,  as  a  sort  of  human 
switchboard,  who  linked  them  all  together  and 
kept  them  busy. 

[164] 


ENUS  M.  BARTON,  FOR  FORTY  YEARS  THE  HEAD  OF  THE  WESTERN  ELECTRIC 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

In  appearance,  Enos  M.  Barton  closely  re- 
sembles ex-President  Eliot,  of  Harvard.  He  is 
slow  in  speech,  simple  in  manner,  and  with  a 
rare  sagacity  in  business  affairs.  He  was  not  an 
organizer,  in  the  modern  sense.  His  policy  was 
to  pick  out  a  man,  put  him  in  a  responsible  place, 
and  judge  him  by  results.  Engineers  could  be- 
come bookkeepers,  and  bookkeepers  could  be- 
come engineers.  Such  a  plan  worked  well  in 
the  earlier  days,  when  the  art  of  telephony  was 
in  the  making,  and  when  there  was  no  source  of 
authority  on  telephonic  problems.  Barton  is 
the  bishop  emeritus  of  the  Western  Electric 
to-day;  and  the  big  industry  is  now  being  run 
by  a  group  of  young  hustlers,  with  H.  B.  Thayer 
at  the  head  of  the  table.  Thayer  is  a  Vermonter 
who  has  climbed  the  ladder  of  experience  from 
its  lower  rungs  to  the  top.  He  is  a  typical 
Yankee  —  lean,  shrewd,  tireless,  and  with  a  cold- 
blooded sense  of  justice  that  fits  him  for  the 
leadership  of  twenty-six  thousand  people. 

So,  as  we  have  seen,  the  telephone  as  Bell  in- 
vented it,  was  merely  a  brilliant  beginning  in 
the  development  of  the  art  of  telephony.  It  was 

[165] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

an  elfin  birth  —  an  elusive  and  delicate  sprite 
that  had  to  be  nurtured  into  maturity.  It  was 
like  a  soul,  for  which  a  body  had  to  be  created; 
and  no  one  knew  how  to  make  such  a  body. 
Had  it  been  born  in  some  less  energetic  country, 
it  might  have  remained  feeble  and  undeveloped; 
but  not  in  the  United  States.  Here  in  one  year 
it  had  become  famous,  and  in  three  years  it  had 
become  rich.  Bell's  invincible  patent  was  soon 
buttressed  by  hundreds  of  others.  An  open- 
door  policy  was  adopted  for  invention.  Change 
followed  change  to  such  a  degree  that  the  ex- 
perts of  1880  would  be  lost  to-day  in  the  mazes  of 
a  telephone  'exchange. 

The  art  of  the  telephone  engineer  has  in  thirty 
years  grown  from  the  most  crude  and  clumsy 
of  experiments  into  an  exact  and  comprehensive 
profession.  As  Carty  has  aptly  said,  "At  first 
we  invariably  approached  every  problem  from 
the  wrong  end.  If  we  had  been  told  to  load  a 
herd  of  cattle  on  a  steamer,  our  method  would 
have  been  to  hire  a  Hagenbeck  to  train  the  cattle 
for  a  couple  of  years,  so  that  they  would  know 
enough  to  walk  aboard  of  the  ship  when  he  gave 

[166] 


THE      HISTORY      OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

the  signal;  but  to-day,  if  we  had  to  ship  cattle, 
we  would  know  enough  to  make  a  greased  chute 
and  slide  them  on  board  in  a  jiffy." 

The  telephone  world  has  now  its  own  standards 
and  ideals.  It  has  a  language  of  its  own,  a  tele- 
phonese  that  is  quite  unintelligible  to  outsiders. 
It  has  as  many  separate  branches  of  study  as 
medicine  or  law.  There  are  few  men,  half  a 
dozen  at  most,  who  can  now  be  said  to  have  a 
general  knowledge  of  telephony.  And  no  mat- 
ter how  wise  a  telephone  expert  may  be,  he  can 
never  reach  perfection,  because  of  the  amazing 
variety  of  things  that  touch  or  concern  his 
profession. 

"No  one  man  knows  all  the  details  now,"  said 
Theodore  Vail.  "Several  days  ago  I  was  walk- 
ing through  a  telephone  exchange  and  I  saw 
something  new.  I  asked  Mr.  Carty  to  explain 
it.  He  is  our  chief  engineer;  but  he  did  not 
understand  it.  We  called  the  manager.  He 
did  n't  know,  and  called  his  assistant.  He  did  n't 
know,  and  called  the  local  engineer,  who  was  able 
to  tell  us  what  it  was." 

To  sum  up  this  development  of  the  art  of  tele- 

[167] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

phony  —  to  present  a  bird's-eye  view  —  it  may  be 
divided  into  four  periods : 

1.  Experiment.     1876  to  1886.     This  was  the 
period  of  invention,  in  which  there  were  no  ex- 
perts and  no  authorities.     Telephonic  apparatus 
consisted  of  makeshifts  and  adaptations.     It  was 
the  period  of  iron  wire,  imperfect  transmitters, 
grounded  circuits,  boy  operators,   peg  switch- 
boards, local  batteries,  and  overhead  lines. 

2.  Development.     1886     to     1896.     In    this 
period  amateurs  became  engineers.     The  proper 
type  of  apparatus  was  discovered,  and  was  im- 
proved to  a  high  point  of  efficiency.     In  this 
period  came  the  multiple  switchboard,  copper 
wire,  girl  operators,  underground  cables,  metallic 
circuit,  common  battery,  and  the  long-distance 
lines. 

3.  Expansion.     1896  to  1906.     This  was  the 
era  of  big  business.     It  was  an  autumn  period, 
in  which  the  telephone  men  and  the  public  began 
to  reap  the  fruits  of  twenty  years  of  investment 
and  hard  work.     It  was  the  period  of  the  mes- 
sage rate,  the  pay  station,  the  farm  line,  and  the 
private  branch  exchange. 

[168] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

4.  Organization.  1906 — .  With  the  suc- 
cess of  the  Pupin  coil,  there  came  a  larger  life 
for  the  telephone.  It  became  less  local  and  more 
national.  It  began  to  link  together  its  scattered 
parts.  It  discouraged  the  waste  and  anarchy 
of  duplication.  It  taught  its  older,  but  smaller 
brother,  the  telegraph,  to  cooperate.  It  put 
itself  more  closely  in  touch  with  the  will  of  the 
public.  And  it  is  now  pushing  ahead,  along  the 
two  roads  of  standardization  and  efficiency, 
toward  its  ideal  of  one  universal  telephone  sys- 
tem for  the  whole  nation.  The  key-word  of 
the  telephone  development  of  to-day  is  this  — 
organization. 


[169] 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   EXPANSION   OF   THE   BUSINESS 

r¥l  HE  telephone  business  did  not  really  begin 
•*•  to  grow  big  and  overspread  the  earth  until 
1896,  but  the  keynote  of  expansion  was  first 
sounded  by  Theodore  Vail  in  the  earliest  days, 
when  as  yet  the  telephone  was  a  babe  in  arms. 
In  1879  Vail  said,  in  a  letter  written  to  one  of  his 
captains : 

"Tell  our  agents  that  we  have  a  proposition 
on  foot  to  connect  the  different  cities  for  the  pur- 
pose of  personal  communication,  and  in  other 
ways  to  organize  a  grand  telephonic  system." 

This  was  brave  talk  at  that  time,  when  there 
were  not  in  the  whole  world  as  many  telephones 
as  there  are  to-day  in  Cincinnati.  It  was  brave 
talk  in  those  days  of  iron  wire,  peg  switchboards, 
and  noisy  diaphragms.  Most  telephone  men 
regarded  it  as  nothing  more  than  talk.  They  did 
not  see  any  business  future  for  the  telephone  ex- 

[170] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

cept  in  short-distance  service.  But  Vail  was  in 
earnest.  His  previous  experience  as  the  head  of 
the  railway  mail  service  had  lifted  him  up  to  a 
higher  point  of  view.  He  knew  the  need  of  a 
national  system  of  communication  that  would  be 
quicker  and  more  direct  than  either  the  telegraph 
or  the  post  office. 

"I  saw  that  if  the  telephone  could  talk  one 
mile  to-day,"  he  said,  "it  would  be  talking  a  hun- 
dred miles  to-morrow."  And  he  persisted,  in 
spite  of  a  considerable  deal  of  ridicule,  in  main- 
taining that  the  telephone  was  destined  to  con- 
nect cities  and  nations  as  well  as  individuals. 

Four  months  after  he  had  prophesied  the 
"grand  telephonic  system,"  he  encouraged 
Charles  J.  Glidden,  of  world-tour  fame,  to  build 
a  telephone  line  between  Boston  and  Lowell. 
This  was  the  first  inter-city  line.  It  was  well 
placed,  as  the  owners  of  the  Lowell  mills  lived  in 
Boston,  and  it  made  a  small  profit  from  the 
start.  This  success  cheered  Vail  on  to  a  master- 
effort.  He  resolved  to  build  a  line  from  Boston 
to  Providence,  and  was  so  stubbornly  bent  upon 
doing  this  that  when  the  Bell  Company  refused 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

to  act,  he  picked  up  the  risk  and  set  off  with  it 
alone.  He  organized  a  company  of  well- 
known  Rhode  Islanders  —  nicknamed  the  "Gov- 
ernors' Company" —  and  built  the  line.  It  was 
a  failure  at  first,  and  went  by  the  name  of  "Vail's 
Folly."  But  Engineer  Carty,  by  a  happy 
thought,  doubled  the  wire,  and  thus  in  a  moment 
established  two  new  factors  in  the  telephone 
business  —  the  Metallic  Circuit  and  the  Long 
Distance  line. 

At  once  the  Bell  Company  came  over  to  Vail's 
point  of  view,  bought  his  new  line,  and  launched 
out  upon  what  seemed  to  be  the  foolhardy  enter- 
prise of  stringing  a  double  wire  from  Boston  to 
New  York.  This  was  to  be  not  only  the  longest 
of  all  telephone  lines,  strung  on  ten  thousand 
poles ;  it  was  to  be  a  line  de  luxe,  built  of  glisten- 
ing red  copper,  not  iron.  Its  cost  was  to  be 
seventy  thousand  dollars,  which  was  an  enor- 
mous sum  in  those  hardscrabble  days.  There 
was  much  opposition  to  such  extravagance,  and 
much  ridicule.  "I  wouldn't  take  that  line  as 
a  gift,"  said  one  of  the  Bell  Company's  officials. 

But  when  the  last  coil  of  wire  was  stretched 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

into  place,  and  the  first  "Hello"  leaped  from 
Boston  to  New  York,  the  new  line  was  a  vic- 
torious success.  It  carried  messages  from  the 
first  day;  and  more,  it  raised  the  whole  telephone 
business  to  a  higher  level.  It  swept  away  the 
prejudice  that  telephone  service  could  become 
nothing  more  than  a  neighborhood  affair.  "It 
was  the  salvation  of  the  business,"  said  Edward 
J.  Hill.  It  marked  a  turning-point  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  telephone,  when  the  day  of  small 
things  was  ended  and  the  day  of  great  things  was 
begun.  No  one  man,  no  hundred  men,  had 
created  it.  It  was  the  final  result  of  ten  years  of 
invention  and  improvement. 

While  this  epoch-making  line  was  being 
strung,  Vail  was  pushing  his  "grand  telephonic 
system"  policy  by  organizing  The  American 
Telephone  and  Telegraph  Company.  This,  too, 
was  a  master-stroke.  It  was  the  introduction  of 
the  staff-and-line  method  of  organization  into 
business.  It  was  doing  for  the  forty  or  fifty 
Bell  Companies  what  Von  Moltke  did  for  the 
German  army  prior  to  the  Franco-Prussian 
War.  It  was  the  creation  of  a  central  company 

[173] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

that  should  link  all  local  companies  together, 
and  itself  own  and  operate  the  means  by  which 
these  companies  are  united.  This  central  com- 
pany was  to  grapple  with  all  national  problems, 
to  own  all  telephones  and  long-distance  lines,  to 
protect  all  patents,  and  to  be  the  headquarters  of 
invention,  information,  capital,  and  legal  protec- 
tion for  the  entire  federation  of  Bell  Com- 
panies. 

Seldom  has  a  company  been  started  with  so 
small  a  capital  and  so  vast  a  purpose.  It  had 
no  more  than  $100,000  of  capital  stock,  in  1885; 
but  its  declared  object  was  nothing  less  than  to 
establish  a  system  of  wire  communication  for 
the  human  race.  Here  are,  in  its  own  words, 
the  marching  orders  of  this  Company:  "To 
connect  one  or  more  points  in  each  and  every 
city,  town,  or  place  in  the  State  of  New  York, 
with  one  or  more  points  in  each  and  every  other 
city,  town,  or  place  in  said  State,  and  in  each 
and  every  other  of  the  United  States,  and  in 
Canada,  and  Mexico;  and  each  and  every  of  said 
cities,  towns,  and  places  is  to  be  connected  with 
each  and  every  other  city,  town,  or  place  in  said 

!«*! 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

States  and  countries,  and  also  by  cable  and  other 
appropriate  means  with  the  rest  of  the  known 
world." 

So  ran  Vail's  dream,  and  for  nine  years  he 
worked  mightily  to  make  it  come  true.  He  re- 
mained until  the  various  parts  of  the  business  had 
grown  together,  and  until  his  plan  for  a  "grand 
telephonic  system"  was  under  way  and  fairly 
well  understood.  Then  he  went  out,  into  a 
series  of  picturesque  enterprises,  until  he  had 
built  up  a  four-square  fortune;  and  recently,  in 
1907,  he  came  back  to  be  the  head  of  the  tele- 
phone business,  and  to  complete  the  work  of  or- 
ganization that  he  started  thirty  years  before. 

When  Vail  said  auf  wiedersehen  to  the  tele- 
phone business,  it  had  passed  from  infancy  to 
childhood.  It  was  well  shaped  but  not  fully 
grown.  Its  pioneering  days  were  over.  It  was 
self-supporting  and  had  a  little  money  in  the 
bank.  But  it  could  not  then  have  carried  the 
load  of  traffic  that  it  carries  to-day.  It  had  still 
too  many  problems  to  solve  and  too  much  general 
inertia  to  overcome.  It  needed  to  be  conserved, 
drilled,  educated,  popularized.  And  the  man 

[175] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

who  was  finally  chosen  to  replace  Vail  was  in 
many  respects  the  appropriate  leader  for  such  a 
preparatory  period. 

Hudson  —  John  Elbridge  Hudson  —  was  the 
name  of  the  new  head  of  the  telephone  people. 
He  was  a  man  of  middle  age,  born  in  Lynn  and 
bred  in  Boston;  a  long-pedigreed  New  Eng- 
lander,  whose  ancestors  had  smelted  iron  ore  in 
Lynn  when  Charles  the  First  was  King.  He 
was  a  lawyer  by  profession  and  a  university  pro- 
fessor by  temperament.  His  specialty,  as  a  man 
of  affairs,  had  been  marine  law;  and  his  hobby 
was  the  collection  of  rare  books  and  old  English 
engravings.  He  was  a  master  of  the  Greek  lan- 
guage, and  very  fond  of  using  it.  On  all  possi- 
ble occasions  he  used  the  language  of  Pericles  in 
his  conversation ;  and  even  carried  this  preference 
so  far  as  to  write  his  business  memoranda  in 
Greek.  He  was  above  all  else  a  scholar,  then  a 
lawyer,  and  somewhat  incidentally  the  central 
figure  in  the  telephone  world. 

But  it  was  of  tremendous  value  to  the  tele- 
phone business  at  that  time  to  have  at  its  head  a 
man  of  Hudson's  intellectual  and  moral  calibre. 

[176] 


JOHN   E.  HUDSON 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

He  gave  it  tone  and  prestige.  He  built  up  its 
credit.  He  kept  it  clean  and  clear  above  all 
suspicion  of  wrong-doing.  He  held  fast  what- 
ever had  been  gained.  And  he  prepared  the  way 
for  the  period  of  expansion  by  borrowing  fifty 
millions  for  improvements,  and  by  adding  greatly 
to  the  strength  and  influence  of  the  American 
Telephone  and  Telegraph  Company. 

Hudson  remained  at  the  head  of  the  telephone 
table  until  his  death,  in  1900,  and  thus  lived  to 
see  the  dawn  of  the  era  of  big  business.  Under 
his  regime  great  things  were  done  in  the  develop- 
ment of  the  art.  The  business  was  pushed  ahead 
at  every  point  by  its  captains.  Every  man  in 
his  place,  trying  to  give  a  little  better  service 
than  yesterday  —  that  was  the  keynote  of  the 
Hudson  period.  There  was  no  one  preeminent 
genius.  Each  important  step  forward  was  the 
result  of  the  cooperation  of  many  minds,  and  the 
prodding  necessities  of  a  growing  traffic. 

By  1896,  when  the  Common  Battery  system 
created  a  new  era,  the  telephone  engineer  had 
pretty  well  mastered  his  simpler  troubles.  He 
was  able  to  handle  his  wires,  no  matter  how  many. 

[177] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

By  this  time,  too,  the  public  was  ready  for  the 
telephone.  A  new  generation  had  grown  up, 
without  the  prejudices  of  its  fathers.  People 
had  grown  away  from  the  telegraphic  habit  of 
thought,  which  was  that  wire  communications 
were  expensive  luxuries  for  the  few.  The  tele- 
phone was,  in  fact,  a  new  social  nerve,  so  new  and 
so  novel  that  very  nearly  twenty  years  went  by, 
before  it  had  fully  grown  into  place,  and  before 
the  social  body  developed  the  instinct  of  using  it. 
Not  that  the  difficulties  of  the  telephone 
engineers  were  over,  for  they  were  not.  They 
have  seemed  to  grow  more  numerous  and  com- 
plex every  year.  But  by  1896  enough  had  been 
done  to  warrant  a  forward  movement.  For  the 
next  ten-year  period  the  keynote  of  telephone 
history  was  expansion.  Under  the  prevailing 
flat-rate  plan  of  payment,  all  customers  paid  the 
same  yearly  price  and  then  used  their  telephones 
as  often  as  they  pleased.  This  was  a  simple 
method,  and  the  most  satisfactory  for  small  towns 

4 

and  farming  regions.  But  in  a  great  city  such 
a  plan  grew  to  be  suicidal.  In  New  York,  for 
instance,  the  price  had  to  be  raised  to  $240, 

[178] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

which  lifted  the  telephone  as  high  above  the  mass 
of  the  citizens  as  though  it  were  a  piano  or  a 
diamond  sunburst.  Such  a  plan  was  strangling 
the  business.  It  was  shutting  out  the  small 
users.  It  was  clogging  the  wires  with  deadhead 
calls.  It  was  giving  some  people  too  little 
service  and  others  too  much.  It  was  a  very  un- 
satisfactory  situation. 

How  to  extend  the  service  and  at  the  same  time 
cheapen  it  to  small  users  —  that  was  the  Gordian 
knot;  and  the  man  who  unquestionably  did  most 
to  untie  it  was  Edward  J.  Hall.  Mr.  Hall 
founded  the  telephone  business  in  Buffalo  in 
1878,  and  seven  years  afterwards  became  the 
chief  of  the  long-distance  traffic.  He  was  then, 
and  is  to-day,  one  of  the  statesmen  of  the  tele- 
phone. For  more  than  thirty  years  he  has  been 
the  "candid  friend"  of  the  business,  incessantly 
suggesting,  probing,  and  criticising.  Keen  and 
dispassionate,  with  a  genius  for  mercilessly  cut- 
ting to  the  marrow  of  *a  proposition,  Hall  has 
at  the  same  time  been  a  zealot  for  the  improve- 
ment and  extension  of  telephone  service.  It  was 
he  who  set  the  agents  free  from  the  ball-and- 

[179] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

chain  of  royalties,  allowing  them  to  pay  instead  a 
percentage  of  gross  receipts.  And  it  was  he 
who  "broke  the  jam,"  as  a  lumberman  would 
say,  by  suggesting  the  message  rate  system. 

By  this  plan,  which  U.  N.  Bethell  developed 
to  its  highest  point  in  New  York,  a  user  of  the 
telephone  pays  a  fixed  minimum  price  for  a 
certain  number  of  messages  per  year,  and  extra^ 
for  all  messages  over  this  number.  The  large 
user  pays  more,  and  the  little  user  pays  less.  It 
opened  up  the  way  to  such  an  expansion  of  tele- 
phone business  as  Bell,  in  his  rosiest  dreams,  had 

never   imagined.     In   three   years,   after   1896, 

v 
there  were  twice  as  many  users ;  in  six  years  there 

were  four  times  as  many ;  in  ten  years  there  were 
eight  to  one.  What  with  the  message  rate  and 
the  pay  station,  the  telephone  was  now  on  its  way 
to  be  universal.  It  was  adapted  to  all  kinds  and 
conditions  of  men.  A  great  corporation,  nerved 
at  every  point  with  telephone  wires,  may  now  pay 
fifty  thousand  dollars  to  the  Bell  Company,  while 
at  the  same  time  a  young  Irish  immigrant  boy, 
just  arrived  in  New  York  City,  may  offer  five 

[180] 


EDWARD  J.  HALL 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

coppers  and  find  at  his  disposal  a  fifty  million 
dollar  telephone  system. 

When  the  message  rate  was  fairly  well  estab- 
lished, Hudson  died  —  fell  suddenly  to  the 
ground  as  he  was  about  to  step  into  a  railway 
carriage.  In  his  place  came  Frederick  P.  Fish, 
also  a  lawyer  and  a  Bostonian.  Fish  was  a  pop- 
ular, optimistic  man,  with  a  "full-speed-ahead" 
temperament.  He  pushed  the  policy  of  expan- 
sion until  he  broke  all  the  records.  He  borrowed 
money  in  stupendous  amounts  —  $150,000,000  at 
one  time  —  and  flung  it  into  a  campaign  of  red- 
hot  development.  More  business  he  demanded, 
and  more,  and  more,  until  his  captains,  like  a 
•thirty-horse  team  of  galloping  horses,  became 
very  nearly  uncontrollable. 

It  was  a  fast  and  furious  period.  The  whole 
country  was  ablaze  with  a  passion  of  prosperity. 
After  generations  of  conflict,  the  men  with  large 
ideas  had  at  last  put  to  rout  the  men  of  small 
ideas.  The  waste  and  folly  of  competition  had 
everywhere  driven  men  to  the  policy  of  coopera- 
tion. Mills  were  linked  to  mills  and  factories  to 

[181] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

factories,  in  a  vast  mutualism  of  industry  such 
as  no  other  age,  perhaps,  has  ever  known.  And 
as  the  telephone  is  essentially  the  instrument  of 
co-working  and  interdependent  people,  it  found 
itself  suddenly  welcomed  as  the  most  popular  and 
indispensable  of  all  the  agencies  that  put  men  in 
touch  with  each  other. 

To  describe  this  growth  in  a  single  sentence, 
we  might  say  that  the  Bell  telephone  secured  its 
first  million  of  capital  in  1879;  its  first  million  of 
earnings  in  1882;  its  first  million  of  dividends  in 
1884;  its  first  million  of  surplus  in  1885.  It  had 
paid  out  its  first  million  for  legal  expenses  by 
1886;  began  first  to  send  a  million  messages  a 
day  in  1888;  had  strung  its  first  million  miles  o 
wire  in  1900;  and  had  installed  its  first  million 
telephones  in  1898.  By  1897  it  had  spun  as 
many  cobwebs  of  wire  as  the  mighty  Western 
Union  itself;  by  1900  it  had  twice  as  many  miles 
of  wire  as  the  Western  Union,  and  in  1905  five 
times  as  many.  Such  was  the  plunging  progress 
of  the  Bell  Companies  in  this  period  of  expan- 
sion, that  by  1905  they  had  swept  past  all 
European  countries  combined,  not  only  in  the 

[182] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

quality  of  the  service  but  in  the  actual  number  of 
telephones  in  use.  This,  too,  without  a  cent  of 
public  money,  or  the  protection  of  a  tariff,  or  the 
prestige  of  a  governmental  bureau. 

By  1892  Boston  and  New  York  were  talking 
to  Chicago,  Milwaukee,  Pittsburg,  and  Wash- 
ington. One-half  of  the  people  of  the  United 
States  were  within  talking  distance  of  each  other. 
The  thousand-mile  talk  had  ceased  to  be  a  fairy 
tale.  Several  years  later  the  western  end  of  the 
line  was  pushed  over  the  plains  to  Nebraska, 
enabling  the  spoken  word  in  Boston  to  be  heard 
in  Omaha.  Slowly  and  with  much  effort  the 
public  were  taught  to  substitute  the  telephone  for 
travel.  A  special  long-distance  salon  was  fitted 
up  in  New  York  City  to  entice  people  into  the 
habit  of  talking  to  other  cities.  Cabs  were  sent 
for  customers;  and  when  one  arrived,  he  was 
escorted  over  Oriental  rugs  to  a  gilded  booth, 
draped  with  silken  curtains.  This  was  the 
famous  "Room  Nine."  By  such  and  many  other 
allurements  a  larger  idea  of  telephone  service  was 
given  to  the  public  mind;  until  in  1909  at  least 
eighteen  thousand  New  York-Chicago  conversa- 

[183] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tions  were  held,  and  the  revenue  from  strictly 
long-distance  messages  was  twenty-two  thousand 
dollars  a  day. 

By  1906  even  the  Rocky  Mountain  Bell  Com- 
pany had  grown  to  be  a  ten-million-dollar  en- 
terprise. It  began  at  Salt  Lake  City  with  a 
hundred  telephones,  in  1880.  Then  it  reached 
out  to  master  an  area  of  four  hundred  and 
thirteen  thousand  square  miles  —  a  great  Lone 
Land  of  undeveloped  resources.  Its  linemen 
groped  through  dense  forests  where  their  poles 
looked  like  toothpicks  beside  the  towering  pines 
and  cedars.  They  girdled  the  mountains  and 
basted  the  prairies  with  wire,  until  the  lonely 
places  were  brought  together  and  made  sociable. 
They  drove  off  the  Indians,  who  wanted  the 
bright  wire  for  ear-rings  and  bracelets;  and  the 
bears,  which  mistook  the  humming  of  the  wires 
for  the  buzzing  of  bees,  and  persisted  in  gnaw- 
ing the  poles  down.  With  the  most  heroic 
optimism,  this  Rocky  Mountain  Company  per- 
severed until,  in  1906,  it  had  created  a  seventy- 
thousand-mile  nerve-system  for  the  far  West. 

Chicago,  in  this  year,  had  two  hundred  thou- 

[184] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

sand  telephones  in  use,  in  her  two  hundred 
square  miles  of  area.  The  business  had  been 
built  up  by  General  Anson  Stager,  who  was 
himself  wealthy,  and  able  to  attract  the  support 
of  such  men  as  John  Crerar,  H.  H.  Porter,  and 
Robert  T.  Lincoln.  Since  1882  it  has  paid 
dividends,  and  in  one  glorious  year  its  stock 
soared  to  four  hundred  dollars  a  share.  The  old- 
timers  —  the  men  who  clambered  over  roof-tops 
in  1878  and  tacked  iron  wires  wherever  they  could 
without  being  chased  off  —  are  still  for  the  most 
part  in  control  of  the  Chicago  company. 

But  as  might  have  been  expected,  it  was  New 
York  City  that  was  the  record-breaker  when  the 
era  of  telephone  expansion  arrived.  Here  the 
flood  of  big  business  struck  with  the  force  of  a 
tidal  wave.  The  number  of  users  leaped  from 
56,000  in  1900  up  to  310,000  in  1908.  In  a 
single  year  of  sweating  and  breathless  activity, 
65,000  new  telephones  were  put  on  desks  or  hung 
on  walls  —  an  average  of  one  new  user  for  every 
two  minutes  of  the  business  day. 

Literally  tons,  and  hundreds  of  tons,  of  tele- 
phones were  hauled  in  drays  from  the  factory 

[185] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

and  put  in  place  in  New  York's  homes  and 
offices.  More  and  more  were  demanded,  until 
to-day  there  are  more  telephones  in  New  York 
than  there  are  in  the  four  countries,  France, 
Belgium,  Holland,  and  Switzerland  combined. 
As  a  user  of  telephones  New  York  has  risen  to  be 
unapproachable.  Mass  together  all  the  tele- 
phones of  London,  Glasgow,  Liverpool,  Man- 
chester, Birmingham,  Leeds,  Sheffield,  Bristol, 
and  Belfast,  and  there  will  even  then  be  barely  as 
many  as  are  carrying  the  conversations  of  this 
one  American  city. 

In  1879  the  New  York  telephone  directory  was 
a  small  card,  showing  two  hundred  and  fifty-two 
names ;  but  now  it  has  grown  to  be  an  eight-hun- 
dred-page quarterly,  with  a  circulation  of  half  a 
million,  and  requiring  twenty  drays,  forty  horses, 
and  four  hundred  men  to  do  the  work  of  dis- 
tribution. There  was  one  shabby  little  exchange 
thirty  years  ago;  but  now  there  are  fifty-two  ex- 
changes, as  the  nerve-centres  of  a  vast  fifty- 
million-dollar  system.  Incredible  as  it  may  seem 
to  foreigners,  it  is  literally  true  that  in  a  single 
building  in  New  York,  the  Hudson  Terminal, 

[186] 


THE      HISTORY      OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

there  are  more  telephones  than  in  Odessa  or 
Madrid;  more  than  in  the  two  kingdoms  of 
Greece  and  Bulgaria  combined. 

Merely  to  operate  this  system  requires  an  army 
of  more  than  five  thousand  girls.  Merely  to  keep 
their  records  requires  two  hundred  and  thirty-five 
million  sheets  of  paper  a  year.  Merely  to  do  the 
writing  of  these  records  wears  away  five  hundred 
and  sixty  thousand  lead  pencils.  And  merely  to 
give  these  girls  a  cup  of  tea  or  coffee  at  noon, 
compels  the  Bell  Company  to  buy  yearly  six 
thousand  pounds  of  tea,  seventeen  thousand 
pounds  of  coffee,  forty-eight  thousand  cans  of 
condensed  milk,  and  one  hundred  and  forty 
barrels  of  sugar. 

The  myriad  wires  of  this  New  York  system 
are  tingling  with  talk  every  minute  of  the  day 
and  night.  They  are  most  at  rest  between  three 
and  four  o'clock  in  the  morning,  although  even 
then  there  are  usually  ten  calls  a  minute.  Be- 
tween five  and  six  o'clock,  two  thousand  New 
Yorkers  are  awake  and  at  the  telephone.  Half 
an  hour  later  there  are  twice  as  many.  Between 
seven  and  eight  twenty-five  thousand  people 

[187] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

have  called  up  twenty-five  thousand  other  peo- 
ple, so  that  there  are  as  many  people  talking  by 
wire  as  there  were  in  the  whole  city  of  New  York 
in  the  Revolutionary  period.  Even  this  is  only 
the  dawn  of  the  day's  business.  By  half-past 
eight  it  is  doubled ;  by  nine  it  is  trebled ;  by  ten  it 
is  multiplied  sixfold;  and  by  eleven  the  roar  has 
become  an  incredible  babel  of  one  hundred  and 
eighty  thousand  conversations  an  hour,  with 
fifty  new  voices  clamoring  at  the  exchanges  every 
second. 

This  is  "the  peak  of  the  load."  It  is  the  top- 
most pinnacle  of  talk.  It  is  the  utmost  degree  of 
service  that  the  telephone  has  been  required  to 
give  in  any  city.  And  it  is  as  much  a  world's 
wonder,  to  men  and  women  of  imagination,  as 
the  steel  mills  of  Homestead  or  the  turbine 
leviathans  that  curve  across  the  Atlantic  Ocean 
in  four  and  a  half  days. 

As  to  the  men  who  built  it  up:  Charles  F. 
Cutler  died  in  1907,  but  most  of  the  others  are 
still  alive  and  busy.  Union  N.  Bethell,  now  in 
Cutler's  place  at  the  head  of  the  New  York 
Company,  has  been  the  operating  chief  for 

[188] 


FREDERICK   P.  FISH 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

eighteen  years.  He  is  a  man  of  shrewdness  and 
sympathy,  with  a  rare  sagacity  in  solving  knotty 
problems,  a  president  of  the  new  type,  who 
regards  his  work  as  a  sort  of  obligation  he  owes  to 
the  public.  And  just  as  foreigners  go  to  Pitts- 
burg  to  see  the  steel  business  at  its  best;  just  as 
they  go  to  Iowa  and  Kansas  to  see  the  New 
Farmer,  so  they  make  pilgrimages  to  Bethell's 
office  to  learn  the  profession  of  telephony. 

This  unparalleled  telephone  system  of  New 
York  grew  up  without  having  at  any  time  the 
rivalry  of  competition.  But  in  many  other  cities 
and  especially  in  the  Middle  West,  there  sprang 
up  in  1895  a  medley  of  independent  companies. 
The  time  of  the  original  patents  had  expired,  and 
the  Bell  Companies  found  themselves  freed  from 
the  expense  of  litigation  only  to  be  snarled  up  in 
a  tangle  of  duplication.  In  a  few  years  there 
were  six  thousand  of  these  little  Robinson  Crusoe 
companies.  And  by  1901  they  had  put  in  use 
more  than  a  million  telephones  and  were  pro- 
fessing to  have  a  capital  of  a  hundred  millions. 

Most  of  these  companies  were  necessary  and 
did  much  to  expand  the  telephone  business  into 

[189] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

new  territory.  They  were  in  fact  small  mutual 
associations  of  a  dozen  or  a  hundred  farmers, 
whose  aim  was  to  get  telephone  service  at  cost. 
But  there  were  other  companies,  probably  a  thou- 
sand or  more,  which  were  organized  by  promoters 
who  built  their  hopes  on  the  fact  that  the  Bell 
Companies  were  unpopular,  and  on  the  myth  that 
they  were  fabulously  rich.  Instead  of  legiti- 
mately extending  telephone  lines  into  communi- 
ties that  had  none,  these  promoters  proceeded  to 
inflict  the  messy  snarl  of  an  overlapping  system 
upon  whatever  cities  would  give  them  permission 
to  do  so. 

In  this  way,  masked  as  competition,  the 
nuisance  and  waste  of  duplication  began  in  most 
American  cities.  The  telephone  business  was 
still  so  young,  it  was  so  little  appreciated  even  by 
the  telephone  officials  and  engineers,  that  the 
public  regarded  a  second  or  a  third  telephone 
system  in  one  city  as  quite  a  possible  and  desir- 
able innovation.  "We  have  two  ears,"  said  one 
promoter;  "why  not  therefore  have  two  tele- 
phones?" 

This  duplication  went  merrily  on  for  years 

[190] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

before  it  was  generally  discovered  that  the  tele- 
phone is  not  an  ear,  but  a  nerve  system ;  and  that 
such  an  experiment  as  a  duplicate  nerve  system 
has  never  been  attempted  by  Nature,  even  in  her 
most  frivolous  moods.  Most  people  fancied  that 
a  telephone  system  was  practically  the  same  as  a 
gas  or  electric  light  system,  which  can  often  be 
duplicated  with  the  result  of  cheaper  rates  and 
better  service.  They  did  not  for  years  discover 
that  two  telephone  companies  in  one  city  means 
either  half  service  or  double  cost,  just  as  two  fire 
departments  or  two  post  offices  would. 

Some  of  these  duplicate  companies  built  up  a 
complete  plant,  and  gave  good  local  service, 
while  others  proved  to  be  mere  stock  bubbles. 
Most  of  them  were  over-capitalized,  depending 
upon  public  sympathy  to  atone  for  deficiencies  in 
equipment.  One  which  had  printed  fifty  million 
dollars  of  stock  for  sale  was  sold  at  auction  in 
1909  for  four  hundred  thousand  dollars.  All 
told,  there  were  twenty-three  of  these  bubbles 
that  burst  in  1905,  twenty-one  in  1906,  and  twelve 
in  1907.  So  high  has  been  the  death-rate  among 
these  isolated  companies  that  at  a  recent  conven- 

[191] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tion  of  telephone  agents,  the  chairman's  gavel 
was  made  of  thirty-five  pieces  of  wood,  taken 
from  thirty-five  switchboards  of  thirty-five 
extinct  companies. 

A  study  of  twelve  single-system  cities  and 
twenty-seven  double-system  cities  shows  that 
there  are  about  eleven  per  cent  more  telephones 
under  the  double-system,  and  that  where  the 
second  system  is  put  in,  every  fifth  user  is 
obliged  to  pay  for  two  telephones.  The  rates 
are  alike,  whether  a  city  has  one  or  two  systems. 
Duplicating  companies  raised  their  rates  in 
sixteen  cities  out  of  the  twenty-seven,  and 
reduced  them  in  one  city.  Taking  the  United 
States  as  a  whole,  there  are  to-day  fully  two 
hundred  and  fifty  thousand  people  who  are  pay- 
ing for  two  telephones  instead  of  one,  an 
economic  waste  of  at  least  ten  million  dollars  a 
year. 

A  fair-minded  survey  of  the  entire  independent 
telephone  movement  would  probably  show  that 
it  was  at  first  a  stimulant,  followed,  as  stimulants 
usually  are,  by  a  reaction.  It  was  unquestion- 
ably for  several  years  a  spur  to  the  Bell  Com- 

[192] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

panics.  But  it  did  not  fulfil  its  promises  of 
cheap  rates,  better  service,  and  high  dividends; 
it  did  little  or  nothing  to  improve  telephonic 
apparatus,  producing  nothing  new  except  the 

automatic   switchboard  —  a   brilliant  invention, 

• 

which  is  now  in  its  experimental  period.  In  the 
main,  perhaps,  it  has  been  a  reactionary  and 
troublesome  movement  in  the  cities,  and  a  pro- 
gressive movement  among  the  farmers. 

By  1907  it  was  a  wave  that  had  spent  its  force. 
It  was  no  longer  rolling  along  easily  on  the  broad 
ocean  of  hope,  but  broken  and  turned  aside  by  the 
rocks  of  actual  conditions.  One  by  one  the  tele- 
phone promoters  learned  the  limitations  of  an 
isolated  company,  and  asked  to  be  included  as 
members  of  the  Bell  family.  In  1907  four 
hundred  and  fifty-eight  thousand  independent 
telephones  were  linked  by  wire  to  the  nearest  Bell 
Company;  and  in  1908  these  were  followed  by 
three  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  more.  After 
this  landslide  to  the  policy  of  consolidation,  there 
still  remained  a  fairly  large  assortment  of 
independent  companies;  but  they  had  lost  their 
dreams  and  their  illusions. 

[193] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

As  might  have  been  expected,  the  independent 
movement  produced  a  number  of  competent  local 
leaders,  but  none  of  national  importance.  The 
Bell  Companies,  on  the  other  hand,  were  officered 
by  men  who  had  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  been 
surveying  telephone  problems  from  a  national 
point  of  view.  At  their  head,  from  1907  on- 
wards, was  Theodore  N.  Vail,  who  had  returned 
dramatically,  at  the  precise  moment  when  he 
was  needed,  to  finish  the  work  that  he  had  begun 
in  1878.  He  had  been  absent  for  twenty  years, 
developing  water-power  and  building  street- 
railways  in  South  America.  In  the  first  act  of 
the  telephone  drama,  it  was  he  who  put  the  enter- 
prise upon  a  business  basis,  and  laid  down  the 
first  principles  of  its  policy.  In  the  second  and 
third  acts  he  had  no  place ;  but  when  the  curtain 
rose  upon  the  fourth  act,  Vail  was  once  more  the 
central  figure,  standing  white-haired  among  his 
captains,  and  pushing  forward  the  completion 
of  the  "grand  telephonic  system"  that  he  had 
dreamed  of  when  the  telephone  was  three 
years  old. 

[194] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Thus  it  came  about  that  the  telephone  business 
was  created  by  Vail,  conserved  by  Hudson, 
expanded  by  Fish,  and  is  now  in  process  of  being 
consolidated  by  Vail.  It  is  being  knit  together 
into  a  stupendous  Bell  System  —  a  federation  of 
self-governing  companies,  united  by  a  central 
company  that  is  the  busiest  of  them  all.  It  is  no 
longer  protected  by  any  patent  monopoly. 
Whoever  is  rich  enough  and  rash  enough  may 
enter  the  field.  But  it  has  all  the  immeasurable 
advantages  that;,  come  from  long  experience, 
immense  bulk,  the  most  highly  skilled  specialists, 
and  an  abundance  of  capital.  "The  Bell  System 
is  strong,"  says  Vail,  "because  we  are  all  tied 
up  together;  and  the  success  of  one  is  therefore 
the  concern  of  all." 

The  Bell  System!  Here  we  have  the  motif 
of  American  telephone  development.  Here  is 
the  most  comprehensive  idea  that  has  entered  any 
telephone  engineer's  brain.  Already  this  Bell 
System  has  grown  to  be  so  vast,  so  nearly  akin 
to  a  national  nerve  system,  that  there  is  nothing 
else  to  which  we  can  compare  it.  It  is  so  wide- 

[195] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

spread  that  few  are  aware  of  its  greatness.  It 
is  strung  out  over  fifty  thousand  cities  and 
communities. 

If  it  were  all  gathered  together  into  one  place, 
this  Bell  System,  it  would  make  a  city  of 
Telephonia  as  large  as  Baltimore.  It  would 
contain  half  of  the  telephone  property  of  the 
world.  Its  actual  wealth  would  be  fully  $760,- 
000,000,  and  its  revenue  would  be  greater  than 
the  revenue  of  the  city  of  New  York. 

Part  of  the  property  of  the  ci'.ty  of  Telephonia 
consists  of  ten  million  poles,  as  many  as  would 
make  a  fence  from  New  York  to  California,  or 
put  a  stockade  around  Texas.  If  the  Telephon- 
ians  wished  to  use  these  poles  at  home,  they  might 
drive  them  in  as  piles  along  their  water-front, 
and  have  a  twenty-five  thousand-acre  dock;  or  if 
their  city  were  a  hundred  square  miles  in  extent, 
they  might  set  up  a  seven-ply  wall  around  it  with 
these  poles. 

Wire,  too !  Eleven  million  miles  of  it !  This 
city  of  Telephonia  would  be  the  capital  of  an 
empire  of  wire.  Not  all  the  men  in  New  York 

[196] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

State  could  shoulder  this  burden  of  wire  and 
cany  it.  Throw  all  the  people  of  Illinois  in 
one  end  of  the  scale,  and  put  on  the  other  side  the 
wire-wealth  of  Telephonia,  and  long  before  the 
last  coil  was  in  place,  the  Illinoisans  would  be  in 
the  air. 

What  would  this  city  do  for  a  living?  It 
would  make  two-thirds  of  the  telephones,  cables, 
and  switchboards  of  all  countries.  Nearly  one- 
quarter  of  its  citizens  would  work  in  factories, 
while  the  others  would  be  busy  in  six  thousand 
exchanges,  making  it  possible  for  the  people  of 
the  United  States  to  talk  to  one  another  at  the 
rate  of  seven  thousand  million  conversations  a 
year. 

The  pay-envelope  army  that  moves  to  work 
every  morning  in  Telephonia  would  be  a  host  of 
one  hundred  and  ten  thousand  men  and  girls, 
mostly  girls, —  as  many  girls  as  would  fill  Vassar 
College  a  hundred  times  and  more,  or  double  the 
population  of  Nevada.  Put  these  men  and  girls 
in  line,  march  them  ten  abreast,  and  six  hours 
would  pass  before  the  last  company  would  arrive 

[197] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

at  the  reviewing  stand.  In  single  file  this  throng 
of  Telephonians  would  make  a  living  wall  from 
New  York  to  New  Haven. 

Such  is  the  extraordinary  city  of  which  Alex- 
ander Graham  Bell  was  the  only  resident  in  1875. 
It  has  been  built  up  without  the  backing  of  any 
great  bank  or  multi-millionaire.  There  have 
been  no  Vanderbilts  in  it,  no  Astors,  Rocke- 
fellers, Rothschilds,  Harrimans.  There  are  even 
now  only  four  men  who  own  as  many  as  ten 
thousand  shares  of  the  stock  of  the  central  com- 
pany. This  Bell  System  stands  as  the  life-work 
of  unprivileged  men,  who  are  for  the  most  part 
sti!1.  alive  and  busy.  With  very  few  and  trivial 
exceptions,  every  part  of  it  was  made  in  the 
United  States.  No  other  industrial  organism  of 
equal  size  owes  foreign  countries  so  little.  Alike 
in  its  origin,  its  development,  and  its  highest 
point  of  efficiency  and  expansion,  the  telephone  is 
as  essentially  American  as  the  Declaration  of  In- 
dependence or  the  monument  on  Bunker  Hill. 


[198] 


CHAPTER  VI 

NOTABLE  USERS  OF  THE  TELEPHONE 

T  ^  THAT  we  might  call  the  telephonization  of 
city  life,  for  lack  of  a  simpler  word,  has 
remarkably  altered  our  manner  of  living  from 
what  it  was  in  the  days  of  Abraham  Lincoln.  It 
has  enabled  us  to  be  more  social  and  cooperative. 
It  has  literally  abolished  the  isolation  of  separate 
families,  and  has  made  us  members  of  one  great 
family.  It  has  become  so  truly  an  organ  of  the 
social  body  that  by  telephone  we  now  enter  into 
contracts,  give  evidence,  try  lawsuits,  make 
speeches,  propose  marriage,  confer  degrees, 
appeal  to  voters,  and  do  almost  everything  else 
that  is  a  matter  of  speech. 

In  stores  and  hotels  this  wire  traffic  has  grown 
to  an  almost  bewildering  extent,  as  these  are  the 
places  where  many  interests  meet.  The  hundred 
largest  hotels  in  New  York  City  have  twenty-one 
thousand  telephones  —  nearly  as  many  as  the 

[199] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

continent  of  Africa  and  more  than  the  kingdom 
of  Spain.  In  an  average  year  they  send  six 
million  messages.  The  Waldorf-Astoria  alone 
tops  all  residential  buildings  with  eleven  hundred 
and  twenty  telephones  and  five  hundred  thou- 
sand calls  a  year;  while  merely  the  Christmas 
Eve  orders  that  flash  into  Marshall  Field's  store, 
or  John  Wanamaker's,  have  risen  as  high  as  the 
three  thousand  mark. 

Whether  the  telephone  does  most  to  concen- 
trate population,  or  to  scatter  it,  is  a  question 
that  has  not  yet  been  examined.  It  is  certainly 
true  that  it  has  made  the  skyscraper  possible, 
and  thus  helped  to  create  an  absolutely  new  type 
of  city,  such  as  was  never  imagined  even  in  the 
fairy  tales  of  ancient  nations.  The  skyscraper 
is  ten  years  younger  than  the  telephone.  It  is 
now  generally  seen  to  be  the  ideal  building  for 
business  offices.  It  is  one  of  the  few  types  of 
architecture  that  may  fairly  be  called  American. 
And  its  efficiency  is  largely,  if  not  mainly,  due  to 
the  fact  that  its  inhabitants  may  run  errands  by 
telephone  as  well  as  by  elevator. 

There  seems  to  be  no  sort  of  activity  which  is 
[200] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

not  being  made  more  convenient  by  the  tele- 
phone. It  is  used  to  call  the  duck-shooters  in 
Western  Canada  when  a  flock  of  birds  has 
arrived;  and  to  direct  the  movements  of  the 
Dragon  in  Wagner's  grand  opera  "Siegfried." 
At  the  last  Yale-Harvard  football  game,  it  con- 
veyed almost  instantaneous  news  to  fifty  thou- 
sand people  in  various  parts  of  New  England. 
At  the  Vanderbilt  Cup  Race  its  wires  girdled  the 
track  and  reported  every  gain  or  mishap  of  the 
racing  autos.  And  at  such  expensive  pageants 
as  that  of  the  Quebec  Tercentenary  in  1908, 
where  four  thousand  actors  came  and  went  upon 
a  ten-acre  stage,  every  order  was  given  by 
telephone. 

Public  officials,  even  in  the  United  States,  have 
been  slow  to  change  from  the  old-fashioned  and 
more  dignified  use  of  written  documents  and  uni- 
formed messengers ;  but  in  the  last  ten  years  there 
has  been  a  sweeping  revolution  in  this  respect. 
Government  by  telephone!  This  is  a  new  idea 
that  has  already  arrived  in  the  more  efficient 
departments  of  the  Federal  service.  And  as  for 
the  present  Congress,  that  body  has  gone  so  far 

[201] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

as  to  plan  for  a  special  system  of  its  own,  in  both 
Houses,  so  that  all  official  announcements  may 
be  heard  by  wire. 

Garfield  was  the  first  among  American  Presi- 
dents to  possess  a  telephone.  An  exhibition 
instrument  was  placed  in  his  house,  without  cost, 
in  1878,  while  he  was  still  a  member  of  Congress. 
Neither  Cleveland  nor  Harrison,  for  tempera- 
mental reasons,  used  the  magic  wire  very  often. 
Under  their  regime,  there  was  one  lonely  idle 
telephone  in  the  White  House,  used  by  the 
servants  several  times  a  week.  But  with  Mc- 
Kinley  came  a  new  order  of  things.  To  him  a 
telephone  was  more  than  a  necessity.  It  was  a 
pastime,  an  exhilarating  sport.  He  was  the  one 
President  who  really  revelled  in  the  comforts  of 
telephony.  In  1895  he  sat  in  his  Canton  home 
and  heard  the  cheers  of  the  Chicago  Convention. 
Later  he  sat  there  and  ran  the  first  presidential 
telephone  campaign;  talked  to  his  managers  in 
thirty-eight  States.  Thus  he  came  to  regard  the 
telephone  with  a  higher  degree  of  appreciation 
than  any  of  his  predecessors  had  done,  and 
eulogized  it  on  many  public  occasions.  "It  is 

[202] 


DETAILS   OF   LAYING   TELEPHONE   CABLES   IN    NEW   YORK   STREETS 

Bending  Three-inch  Iron  Pipes  for  38th  Street  Subway 

Rock  Drillers  in  Trench 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

bringing  us  all  closer  together,"  was  his  favorite 
phrase. 

To  Roosevelt  the  telephone  was  mainly  for 
emergencies.  He  used  it  to  the  full  during  the 
Chicago  Convention  of  1907  and  the  Peace  Con- 
ference at  Portsmouth.  But  with  Taft  the 
telephone  became  again  the  common  avenue  of 
conversation.  He  has  introduced  at  least  one 
new  telephonic  custom  —  a  long-distance  talk 
with  his  family  every  evening,  when  he  is  away 
from  home.  Instead  of  the  solitary  telephone  of 
Cleveland-Harrison  days,  the  White  House  has 
now  a  branch  exchange  of  its  own  —  Main  6  — 
with  a  sheaf  of  wires  that  branch  out  into  every 
room  as  well  as  to  the  nearest  central. 

Next  to  public  officials,  bankers  were  perhaps 
the  last  to  accept  the  facilities  of  the  telephone. 
They  were  slow  to  abandon  the  fallacy  that  no 
business  can  be  done  without  a  written  record. 
James  Stillman,  of  New  York,  was  first  among 
bankers  to  foresee  the  telephone  era.  As  early 
as  1875,  while  Bell  was  teaching  his  infant  tele- 
phone to  talk,  Stillman  risked  two  thousand 
dollars  in  a  scheme  to  establish  a  crude  dial 

[203] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

system  of  wire  communication,  which  later  grew 
into  New  York's  first  telephone  exchange.  At 
the  present  time,  the  banker  who  works  closest  to 
his  telephone  is  probably  George  W.  Perkins,  of 
the  J.  P.  Morgan  group  of  bankers.  "He  is  the 
only  man,"  says  Morgan,  "who  can  raise  twenty 
millions  in  twenty  minutes."  The  Perkins  plan 
of  rapid  transit  telephony  is  to  prepare  a  list  of 
names,  from  ten  to  thirty,  and  to  flash  from  one 
to  another  as  fast  as  the  operator  can  ring  them 
up.  Recently  one  of  the  other  members  of  the 
Morgan  bank  proposed  to  enlarge  its  telephone 
equipment.  "What  will  we  gain  by  more  wires  ?" 
asked  the  operator.  "If  we  were  to  put  in  a  six- 
hundred  pair  cable,  Mr.  Perkins  would  keep  it 
busy." 

The  most  brilliant  feat  of  the  telephone  in  the 
financial  world  was  done  during  the  panic  of 
1907.  At  the  height  of  the  storm,  on  a  Saturday 
evening,  the  New  York  bankers  met  in  an  al- 
most desperate  conference.  They  decided,  as  an 
emergency  measure  of  self -protection,  not  to  ship 
cash  to  Western  banks.  At  midnight  they  tele- 
phoned this  decision  to  the  bankers  of  Chicago 

[204] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

and  St.  Louis.  These  men,  in  turn,  conferred  by 
telephone,  and  on  Sunday  afternoon  called  up  the 
bankers  of  neighboring  States.  And  so  the  news 
went  from  'phone  to  'phone,  until  by  Monday 
morning  all  bankers  and  chief  depositors  were 
aware  of  the  situation,  and  prepared  for  the 
team-play  that  prevented  any  general  disaster. 

As  for  stockbrokers  of  the  Wall  Street  species, 
they  transact  practically  all  their  business  by 
telephone.  In  their  stock  exchange  stand  six 
hundred  and  forty-one  booths,  each  one  the  ter- 
minus of  a  private  wire.  A  firm  of  brokers  will 
count  it  an  ordinary  year's  talking  to  send  fifty 
thousand  messages;  and  there  is  one  firm  which 
last  year  sent  twice  as  many.  Of  all  brokers, 
the  one  who  finally  accomplished  most  by  tele- 
phony was  unquestionably  E.  H.  Harriman.  In 
the  mansion  that  he  built  at  Arden,  there  were 
a  hundred  telephones,  sixty  of  them  linked  to 
the  long-distance  lines.  What  the  brush  is  to 
the  artist,  what  the  chisel  is  to  the  sculptor,  the 
telephone  was  to  Harriman.  He  built  his  for- 
tune with  it.  It  was  in  his  library,  his  bathroom, 
his  private  car,  his  camp  in  the  Oregon  wilder- 

[205] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

ness.  No  transaction  was  too  large  or  too  in- 
volved to  be  settled  over  its  wires.  He  saved 
the  credit  of  the  Erie  by  telephone  —  lent  it  five 
million  dollars  as  he  lay  at  home  on  a  sickbed. 
"He  is  a  slave  to  the  telephone,"  wrote  a  mag- 
azine writer.  "Nonsense,"  replied  Harriman, 
"it  is  a  slave  to  me." 

The  telephone  arrived  in  time  to  prevent  big 
corporations  from  being  unwieldy  and  aristo- 
cratic. The  foreman  of  a  Pittsburg  coal  com- 
pany may  now  stand  in  his  subterranean  office 
and  talk  to  the  president  of  the  Steel  Trust,  who 
sits  on  the  twenty-first  floor  of  a  New  York  sky- 
scraper. The  long-distance  talks,  especially, 
have  grown  to  be  indispensable  to  the  corpora- 
tions whose  plants  are  scattered  and  geograph- 
ically misplaced  —  to  the  mills  of  New  England, 
for  instance,  that  use  the  cotton  of  the  South  and 
sell  so  much  of  their  product  to  the  Middle  West. 
To  the  companies  that  sell  perishable  com- 
modities, an  instantaneous  conversation  with  a 
buyer  in  a  distant  city  has  often  saved  a  carload 
or  a  cargo.  Such  caterers  as  the  meat-packers, 
who  were  among  the  first  to  realize  what  Bell  had 

[206] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

made  possible,  have  greatly  accelerated  the 
wheels  of  their  business  by  inter-city  conversa- 
tions. For  ten  years  or  longer  the  Cudahys  have 
talked  every  business  morning  between  Omaha 
and  Boston,  via  fifteen  hundred  and  seventy 
miles  of  wire. 

In  the  refining  of  oil,  the  Standard  Oil 
Company  alone,  at  its  New  York  office,  sends 
two  hundred  and  thirty  thousand  messages 
a  year.  In  the  making  of  steel,  a  chemical 
analysis  is  made  of  each  caldron  of  molten 
pig-iron,  when  it  starts  on  its  way  to  be  re- 
fined, and  this  analysis  is  sent  by  telephone 
to  the  steelmaker,  so  that  he  will  know  exactly 
how  each  potf  ul  is  to  be  handled.  In  the  floating 
of  logs  down  rivers,  instead  of  having  relays  of 
shouters  to  prevent  the  logs  from  jamming,  there 
is  now  a  wire  along  the  bank,  with  a  telephone 
linked  on  at  every  point  of  danger.  In  the  rear- 
ing of  skyscrapers,  it  is  now  usual  to  have  a 
temporary  wire  strung  vertically,  so  that  the 
architect  may  stand  on  the  ground  and  confer 
with  a  foreman  who  sits  astride  of  a  naked  girder 
three  hundred  feet  up  in  the  air.  And  in  the 

[207] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

electric  light  business,  the  current  is  distributed 
wholly  by  telephoned  orders.  To  give  New 
York  the  seven  million  electric  lights  that  have 
abolished  night  in  that  city  requires  twelve 
private  exchanges  and  five  hundred  and  twelve 
telephones.  All  the  power  that  creates  this  arti- 
ficial daylight  is  generated  at  a  single  station,  and 
let  flow  to  twenty-five  storage  centres.  Minute 
by  minute,  its  flow  is  guided  by  an  expert,  who 
sits  at  a  telephone  exchange  as  though  he  were  a 
pilot  at  the  wheel  of  an  ocean  liner. 

The  first  steamship  line  to  take  notice  of  the 
telephone  was  the  Clyde,  which  had  a  wire  from 
dock  to  office  in  1877;  and  the  first  railway  was 
the  Pennsylvania,  which  two  years  later  was  per- 
suaded by  Professor  Bell  himself  to  give  it  a 
trial  in  Altoona.  Since  then,  this  railroad  has 
become  the  chief  beneficiary  of  the  art  of  tele- 
phony. It  has  one  hundred  and  seventy-five  ex- 
changes, four  hundred  operators,  thirteen  thou- 
sand telephones,  and  twenty  thousand  miles  of 
wire  —  a  more  ample  system  than  the  city  of 
New  York  had  in  1896. 

To-day  the  telephone  goes  to  sea  in  the  pas- 

[208] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

senger  steamer  and  the  warship.  Its  wires 
are  waiting  at  the  dock  and  the  depot,  so  that  a 
tourist  may  sit  in  his  stateroom  and  talk  with 
a  friend  in  some  distant  office.  It  is  one  of  the 
most  incredible  miracles  of  telephony  that  a 
passenger  at  New  York,  who  is  about  to  start  for 
Chicago  on  a  fast  express,  may  telephone  to 
Chicago  from  the  drawing-room  of  a  Pullman. 
He  himself,  on  the  swiftest  of  all  trains,  will  not 
arrive  in  Chicago  for  eighteen  hours;  but  the 
flying  words  can  make  the  journey,  and  return, 
while  his  train  is  waiting  for  the  signal  to  start. 
In  the  operation  of  trains,  the  railroads  have 
waited  thirty  years  before  they  dared  to  trust  the 
telephone,  just  as  they  waited  fifteen  years  before 
they  dared  to  trust  the  telegraph.  In  1883  a  few 
railways  used  the  telephone  in  a  small  way,  but 
in  1907,  when  a  law  was  passed  that  made  tele- 
graphers highly  expensive,  there  was  a  general 
swing  to  the  telephone.  Several  dozen  roads 
have  now  put  it  in  use,  some  employing  it  as  an 
associate  of  the  Morse  method  and  others  as  a 
complete  substitute.  It  has  already  been  found 
to  be  the  quickest  way  of  despatching  trains.  It 

[209] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

will  do  in  five  minutes  what  the  telegraph  did  in 
ten.  And  it  has  enabled  railroads  to  hire  more 
suitable  men  for  the  smaller  offices. 

In  news-gathering,  too,  much  more  than  in 
railroading,  the  day  of  the  telephone  has  arrived. 
The  Boston  Globe  was  the  first  paper  to  receive 
news  by  telephone.  Later  came  The  Washing- 
ton Star,  which  had  a  wire  strung  to  the  Capitol, 
and  thereby  gained  an  hour  over  its  competitors. 
To-day  the  evening  papers  receive  most  of  their 
news  over  the  wire  a  la  Bell  instead  of  a  la  Morse. 
This  has  resulted  in  a  specialization  of  reporters 
—  one  man  runs  for  the  news  and  another  man 
writes  it.  Some  of  the  runners  never  come  to 
the  office.  They  receive  their  assignments  by 
telephone,  and  their  salaries  by  mail.  There 
are  even  a  few  who  are  allowed  to  telephone 
their  news  directly  to  a  swift  linotype  operator, 
who  clicks  it  into  type  on  his  machine,  without 
the  scratch  of  a  pencil.  This,  of  course,  is  the 
ideal  method  of  news-gathering,  which  is  rarely 
possible. 

A  paper  of  the  first  class,  such  as  The  New 
York  World,  has  now  an  outfit  of  twenty  trunk 

[210] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

lines  and  eighty  telephones.  Its  outgoing  calls 
are  two  hundred  thousand  a  year  and  its  incom- 
ing calls  three  hundred  thousand,  which  means 
that  for  every  morning,  evening,  or  Sunday 
edition,  there  has  been  an  average  of  seven  hun- 
dred and  fifty  messages.  The  ordinary  news- 
paper in  a  small  town  cannot  afford  such  a  serv- 
ice, but  recently  the  United  Press  has  originated 
a  cooperative  method.  It  telephones  the  news 
over  one  wire  to  ten  or  twelve  newspapers  at  one 
time.  In  ten  minutes  a  thousand  words  can  in 
this  way  be  flung  out  to  a  dozen  towns,  as  quickly 
as  by  telegraph  and  much  cheaper. 

But  it  is  in  a  dangerous  crisis,  when  safety 
seems  to  hang  upon  a  second,  that  the  telephone 
is  at  its  best.  It  is  the  instrument  of  emer- 
gencies, a  sort  of  ubiquitous  watchman.  When 
the  girl  operator  in  the  exchange  hears  a  cry  for 
help  —"Quick!  The  hospital!  "  "The  fire  de- 
partment! "  "The  police!  "  she  seldom  waits  to 
hear  the  number.  She  knows  it.  She  is  trained 
to  save  half-seconds.  And  it  is  at  such  moments, 
if  ever,  that  the  users  of  a  telephone  can  appre- 
ciate its  insurance  value.  No  doubt,  if  a  King 

[211] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Richard  III  were  worsted  on  a  modern  battle- 
field, his  instinctive  cry  would  be,  "My  Kingdom 
for  a  telephone !  " 

When  instant  action  is  needed  in  the  city  of 
New  York,  a  General  Alarm  can  in  five  minutes 
be  sent  by  the  police  wires  over  its  whole  vast 
area  of  three  hundred  square  miles.  When,  re- 
cently, a  gas  main  broke  in  Brooklyn,  sixty  girls 
were  at  once  called  to  the  centrals  in  that  part 
of  the  city  to  warn  the  ten  thousand  families  who 
had  been  placed  in  danger.  When  the  ill-fated 
General  Slocum  caught  fire,  a  mechanic  in  a 
factory  on  the  water-front  saw  the  blaze,  and  had 
the  presence  of  mind  to  telephone  the  news- 
papers, the  hospitals,  and  the  police.  When  a 
small  child  is  lost,  or  a  convict  has  escaped  from 
prison,  or  the  forest  is  on  fire,  or  some  menace 
from  the  weather  is  at  hand,  the  telephone  bells 
clang  out  the  news,  just  as  the  nerves  jangle  the 
bells  of  pain  when  the  body  is  in  danger.  In  one 
tragic  case,  the  operator  in  Folsom,  New  Mexico, 
refused  to  quit  her  post  until  she  had  warned  her 
people  of  a  flood  that  had  broken  loose  in  the 
hills  above  the  village.  Because  of  her  courage, 

[212] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

nearly  all  were  saved,  though  she  herself  was 
drowned  at  the  switchboard.  Her  name  —  Mrs. 
S.  J.  Rooke  —  deserves  to  be  remembered. 

If  a  disaster  cannot  be  prevented,  it  is  the 
telephone,  usually,  that  brings  first  aid  to  the 
injured.  After  the  destruction  of  San  Fran- 
cisco, Governor  Guild,  of  Massachusetts,  sent  an 
appeal  for  the  stricken  city  to  the  three  hundred 
and  fifty-four  mayors  of  his  State;  and  by  the 
courtesy  of  the  Bell  Company,  which  carried  the 
messages  free,  they  were  delivered  to  the  last 
and  furthermost  mayors  in  less  than  five  hours. 
After  the  destruction  of  Messina,  an  order  for 
enough  lumber  to  build  ten  thousand  new  houses 
was  cabled  to  New  York  and  telephoned  to 
Western  lumbermen.  So  quickly  was  this  order 
filled  that  on  the  twelfth  day  after  the  arrival 
of  the  cablegram,  the  ships  were  on  their  way 
to  Messina  with  the  lumber.  After  the  Kansas 
City  flood  of  1903,  when  the  drenched  city  was 
without  railways  or  street-cars  or  electric  lights, 
it  was  the  telephone  that  held  the  city  together 
and  brought  help  to  the  danger-spots.  And 
after  the  Baltimore  fire,  the  telephone  exchange 

[213] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

was  the  last  force  to  quit  and  the  first  to  recover. 
Its  girls  sat  on  their  stools  at  the  switchboard 
until  the  window-panes  were  broken  by  the  heat. 
Then  they  pulled  the  covers  over  the  board  and 
walked  out.  Two  hours  later  the  building  was 
in  ashes.  Three  hours  later  another  building 
was  rented  on  the  unburned  rim  of  the  city,  and 
the  wire  chiefs  were  at  work.  In  one  day  there 
was  a  system  of  wires  for  the  use  of  the  city  offi- 
cials. In  two  days  these  were  linked  to  long- 
distance wires;  and  in  eleven  days  a  two-thou- 
sand-line switchboard  was  in  full  working  trim. 
This  feat  still  stands  as  the  record  in  rebuilding. 
In  the  supreme  emergency  of  war,  the  tele- 
phone is  as  indispensable,  very  nearly,  as  the 
cannon.  This,  at  least,  is  the  belief  of  the 
Japanese,  who  handled  their  armies  by  telephone 
when  they  drove  back  the  Russians.  Each  body 
of  Japanese  troops  moved  forward  like  a  silk- 
worm, leaving  behind  it  a  glistening  strand  of 
red  copper  wire.  At  the  decisive  battle  of 
Mukden,  the  silk-worm  army,  with  a  million 
legs,  crept  against  the  Russian  hosts  in  a  vast 
crescent,  a  hundred  miles  from  end  to  end.  By 

[214] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

means  of  this  glistening  red  wire,  the  various 
batteries  and  regiments  were  organized  into 
fifteen  divisions.  Each  group  of  three  divisions 
was  wired  to  a  general,  and  the  five  generals 
were  wired  to  the  great  Oyama  himself,  who 
sat  ten  miles  back  of  the  firing-line  and  sent 
his  orders.  Whenever  a  regiment  lunged  for- 
ward, one  of  the  soldiers  carried  a  telephone  set. 
If  they  held  their  position,  two  other  soldiers  ran 
forward  with  a  spool  of  wire.  In  this  way  and 
under  fire  of  the  Russian  cannon,  one  hundred 
and  fifty  miles  of  wire  were  strung  across  the 
battlefield.  As  the  Japanese  said,  it  was  this 
"flying  telephone"  that  enabled  Oyama  to  manip- 
ulate his  forces  as  handily  as  though  he  were 
playing  a  game  of  chess.  It  was  in  this  war,  too, 
that  the  Mikado's  soldiers  strung  the  costliest  of 
all  telephone  lines,  at  203  Metre  Hill.  When 
the  wire  had  been  basted  up  this  hill  to  the  sum- 
mit, the  fortress  of  Port  Arthur  lay  at  their 
mercy.  But  the  climb  had  cost  them  twenty- 
four  thousand  lives. 

Of  the  seven  million  telephones  in  the  United 
States,  about  two  million  are  now  in  farmhouses. 

[215] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Every  fourth  American  farmer  is  in  telephone 
touch  with  his  neighbors  and  the  market.  Iowa 
leads,  among  the  farming  States.  In  Iowa,  not 
to  have  a  telephone  is  to  belong  to  what  a  Lon- 
doner would  call  the  "submerged  tenth"  of  the 
population.  Second  in  line  comes  Illinois,  with 
Kansas,  Nebraska,  and  Indiana  following  closely 
behind ;  and  at  the  foot  of  the  list,  in  the  matter  of 
farm  telephones,  are  Connecticut  and  Louisiana. 
The  first  farmer  who  discovered  the  value  of 
the  telephone  was  the  market  gardener.  Next 
came  the  bonanza  farmer  of  the  Red  River 
Valley  —  such  a  man,  for  instance,  as  Oliver 
Dalrymple,  of  North  Dakota,  who  found  that  by 
the  aid  of  the  telephone  he  could  plant  and 
harvest  thirty  thousand  acres  of  wheat  in  a  single 
season.  Then,  not  more  than  half  a  dozen  years 
ago,  there  arose  a  veritable  Telephone  Crusade 
among  the  farmers  of  the  Middle  West.  Cheap 
telephones,  yet  fairly  good,  had  by  this  time  been 
made  possible  by  the  improvements  of  the  Bell 
engineers;  and  stories  of  what  could  be  done  by 
telephone  became  the  favorite  gossip  of  the  day. 
One  farmer  had  kept  his  barn  from  being  burned 

[216] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

down  by  telephoning  for  his  neighbors;  another 
had  cleared  five  hundred  dollars  extra  profit  on 
the  sale  of  his  cattle,  by  telephoning  to  the  best 
market;  a  third  had  rescued  a  flock  of  sheep  by 
sending  quick  news  of  an  approaching  blizzard; 
a  fourth  had  saved  his  son's  life  by  getting  an 
instantaneous  message  to  the  doctor;  and  so  on. 
How  the  telephone  saved  a  three  million  dollar 
fruit  crop  in  Colorado,  in  1909,  is  the  story  that 
i§  of  tenest  told  in  the  West.  Until  that  year,  the 
frosts  in  the  Spring  nipped  the  buds.  No  farmer 
could  be  sure  of  his  harvest.  But  in  1909,  the 
fruit-growers  bought  smudge-pots  —  three  hun- 
dred thousand  or  more.  These  were  placed  in 
the  orchards,  ready  to  be  lit  at  a  moment's  notice. 
Next,  an  alliance  was  made  with  the  United 
States  Weather  Bureau  so  that  whenever  the 
Frost  King  came  down  from  the  north,  a  warn- 
ing could  be  telephoned  to  the  farmers.  Just 
when  Colorado  was  pink  with  apple  blossoms,  the 
first  warning  came.  "Get  ready  to  light  up  your 
smudge-pots  in  half  an  hour."  Then  the  farmers 
telephoned  to  the  nearest  towns:  "Frost  is 
coming;  come  and  help  us  in  the  orchards." 

[217] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Hundreds  of  men  rushed  out  into  the  country  on 
horseback  and  in  wagons.  In  half  an  hour  the 
last  warning  came :  "Light  up ;  the  thermometer 
registers  twenty-nine."  The  smudge-pot  artil- 
lery was  set  ablaze,  and  kept  blazing  until  the 
news  came  that  the  icy  forces  had  retreated. 
And  in  this  way  every  Colorado  farmer  who 
had  a  telephone  saved  his  fruit. 

In  some  farming  States,  the  enthusiasm  for  the 
telephone  is  running  so  high  that  mass  meetings 
are  held,  with  lavish  oratory  on  the  general  theme 
of  "Good  Roads  and  Telephones."  And  as  a 
result  of  this  Telephone  Crusade,  there  are  now 
nearly  twenty  thousand  groups  of  farmers,  each 
one  with  a  mutual  telephone  system,  and  one-half 
of  them  with  sufficient  enterprise  to  link  their 
little  webs  of  wires  to  the  vast  Bell  system,  so  that 
at  least  a  million  farmers  have  been  brought  as 
close  to  the  great  cities  as  they  are  to  their  own 
barns. 

What  telephones  have  done  to  bring  in  the 
present  era  of  big  crops,  is  an  interesting  story 
in  itself.  To  compress  it  into  a  sentence,  we 
might  say  that  the  telephone  has  completed 

[218] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

the  labor-saving  movement  which  started  with 
the  McCormick  reaper  in  1831.  It  has  lifted  the 
farmer  above  the  wastefulness  of  being  his  own 
errand-boy.  The  average  length  of  haul  from 
barn  to  market  in  the  United  States  is  nine  and  a 
half  miles,  so  that  every  trip  saved  means  an 
extra  day's  work  for  a  man  and  team.  Instead 
of  travelling  back  and  forth,  often  to  no  purpose, 
the  farmer  may  now  stay  at  home  and  attend  to 
his  stock  and  his  crops. 

As  yet,  few  farmers  have  learned  to  appreciate 

the  value  of  quality  in  telephone  service,  as  they 

have  in  other  lines.     The  same  man  who  will  pay 

six  prices  for  the  best  seed-corn,  and  who  will 

allow  nothing  but  high-grade  cattle  in  his  barn, 

will  at  the  same  time  be  content  with  the  shabbiest 

and  flimsiest  telephone  service,  without  offering 

any  other  excuse  than  that  it  is  cheap.     But 

this  is  a  transient  phase  of  farm  telephony.     The 

cost  of  an  efficient  farm  system  is  now  so  little  — 

not  more  than  two  dollars  a  month,  that  the 

present  trashy  lines  are  certain  sooner  or  later  to 

go  to  the  junk-heap  with  the  sickle  and  the  flail 

and  all  the  other  cheap  and  unprofitable  things. 

[219] 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  TELEPHONE  AND  NATIONAL  EFFICIENCY 

fTlHE  larger  significance  of  the  telephone  is 
•*•  that  it  completes  the  work  of  eliminating 
the  hermit  and  gypsy  elements  of  civilization. 
In  an  almost  ideal  way,  it  has  made  intercom- 
munication possible  without  travel.  It  has 
enabled  a  man  to  settle  permanently  in  one  place, 
and  yet  keep  in  personal  touch  with  his  fellows. 
Until  the  last  few  centuries,  much  of  the  world 
was  probably  what  Morocco  is  to-day  —  a  region 
without  wheeled  vehicles  or  even  roads  of  any 
sort.  There  is  a  mythical  story  of  a  wonderful 
speaking-trumpet  possessed  by  Alexander  the 
Great,  by  which  he  could  call  a  soldier  who  was 
ten  miles  distant;  but  there  was  probably  no 
substitute  for  the  human  voice  except  flags  and 
beacon-fires,  or  any  faster  method  of  travel  than 
the  gait  of  a  horse  or  a  camel  across  ungraded 
plains.  The  first  sensation  of  rapid  transit 

[220] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

doubtless  came  with  the  sailing  vessel ;  but  it  was 
the  play-toy  of  the  winds,  and  unreliable.  When 
Columbus  dared  to  set  out  on  his  famous  voyage, 
he  was  five  weeks  in  crossing  from  Spain  to  the 
West  Indies,  his  best  day's  record  two  hun- 
dred miles.  The  swift  steamship  travel  of  to-day 
did  not  begin  until  1838,  when  the  Great 
Western  raced  over  the  Atlantic  in  fifteen  days. 
As  for  organized  systems  of  intercommunica- 
tion, they  were  unknown  even  under  the  rule  of 
a  Pericles  or  a  Caesar.  There  was  no  post  office 
in  Great  Britain  until  1656  —  a  generation  after 
America  had  begun  to  be  colonized.  There  was 
no  English  mail-coach  until  1784 ;  and  when  Ben- 
jamin Franklin  was  Postmaster  General  at  Phil- 
adelphia, an  answer  by  mail  from  Boston,  when 
all  went  well,  required  not  less  than  three  weeks. 
There  was  not  even  a  hard-surface  road  in  the 
thirteen  United  States  until  1794;  nor  even  a 
postage  stamp  until  1847,  the  year  in  which 
Alexander  Graham  Bell  was  born.  In  this  same 
year  Henry  Clay  delivered  his  memorable  speech 
on  the  Mexican  War,  at  Lexington,  Kentucky, 
and  it  was  telegraphed  to  The  New  York  Herald 

[221] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELETHON] 

at  a  cost  of  five  hundred  dollars,  thus  breaking 
all  previous  records  for  news-gathering  enter 
prise.  Eleven  years  later  the  first  cable  estab 
lished  an  instantaneous  sign-language  betweer 
Americans  and  Europeans;  and  in  1876  there 
came  the  perfect  distance-talking  of  the  tele 
phone. 

No  invention  has  been  more  timely  than  the 
telephone.  It  arrived  at  the  exact  period  wher 
it  was  needed  for  the  organization  of  great  citiei 
and  the  unification  of  nations.  The  new  idea; 
and  energies  of  science,  commerce,  and  coopera 
tion  were  beginning  to  win  victories  in  all  parti 
of  the  earth.  The  first  railroad  had  just  arrivec 
in  China;  the  first  parliament  in  Japan;  the  firsl 
constitution  in  Spain.  Stanley  was  moving  like 
a  tiny  point  of  light  through  the  heart  of  the 
Dark  Continent.  The  Universal  Postal  Unior 
had  been  organized  in  a  little  hall  in  Berne.  The 
Red  Cross  movement  was  twelve  years  old.  Ar 
International  Congress  of  Hygiene  was  bein£ 
held  at  Brussells,  and  an  International  Congresj 
of  Medicine  at  Philadelphia.  De  Lesseps  hac 
finished  the  Suez  Canal  and  was  examining 

[222] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Panama.  Italy  and  Germany  had  recently  been 
built  into  nations;  France  had  finally  swept  aside 
the  Empire  and  the  Commune  and  established  the 
Republic.  And  what  with  the  new  agencies  of 
railroads,  steamships,  cheap  newspapers,  cables, 
and  telegraphs,  the  civilized  races  of  mankind  had 
begun  to  be  knit  together  into  a  practical  consoli- 
dation. 

To  the  United  States,  especially,  the  telephone 
came  as  a  friend  in  need.  After  a  hundred  years 
of  growth,  the  Republic  was  still  a  loose  confed- 
eration of  separate  States,  rather  than  one  great 
united  nation.  It  had  recently  fallen  apart  for 
four  years,  with  a  wide  gulf  of  blood  between; 
and  with  two  flags,  two  Presidents,  and  two 
armies.  In  1876  it  was  hesitating  halfway 
between  doubt  and  confidence,  between  the  old 
political  issues  of  North  and  South,  and  the  new 
industrial  issues  of  foreign  trade  and  the  develop- 
ment of  material  resources.  The  West  was 
being  thrown  open.  The  Indians  and  buffaloes 
were  being  driven  back.  There  was  a  line  of 
railway  from  ocean  to  ocean.  The  population 
was  gaining  at  the  rate  of  a  million  a  year.  Col- 

[223] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

orado  had  just  been  baptized  as  a  new  State. 
And  it  was  still  an  unsolved  problem  whether  or 
not  the  United  States  could  be  kept  united, 
whether  or  not  it  could  be  built  into  an  organic 
nation  without  losing  the  spirit  of  self-help  and 
democracy. 

It  is  not  easy  for  us  to  realize  to-day  how 
young  and  primitive  was  the  United  States  of 
1876.  Yet  the  fact  is  that  we  have  twice  the  pop- 
ulation that  we  had  when  the  telephone  was 
invented.  We  have  twice  the  wheat  crop  and 
twice  as  much  money  in  circulation.  We  have 
three  times  the  railways,  banks,  libraries,  news- 
papers, exports,  farm  values,  and  national 
wealth.  We  have  ten  million  farmers  who  make 
four  times  as  much  money  as  seven  million 
farmers  made  in  1876.  We  spend  four  times  as 
much  on  our  public  schools,  and  we  put  four 
times  as  much  in  the  savings  bank.  We  have 
five  times  as  many  students  in  the  colleges. 
And  we  have  so  revolutionized  our  methods  of 
production  that  we  now  produce  seven  times  as 
much  coal,  fourteen  times  as  much  oil  and  pig- 

[224] 


o 
> 

Q 

li 


-o  2; 

a  o 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

iron,  twenty-two  times  as  much  copper,  and 
forty-three  times  as  much  steel. 

There  were  no  skyscrapers  in  1876,  no 
trolleys,  no  electric  lights,  no  gasoline  engines, 
no  self-binders,  no  bicycles,  no  automobiles. 
There  was  no  Oklahoma,  and  the  combined  pop- 
ulation of  Montana,  Wyoming,  Idaho,  and 
Arizona  was  about  equal  to  that  of  Des  Moines. 
It  was  in  this  year  that  General  Custer  was  killed 
by  the  Sioux ;  that  the  flimsy  iron  railway  bridge 
fell  at  Ashtabula;  that  the  "Molly  Maguires" 
terrorized  Pennsylvania;  that  the  first  wire  of 
the  Brooklyn  Bridge  was  strung;  and  that  Boss 
Tweed  and, Hell  Gate  were  both  put  out  of  the 
way  in  New  York. 

The  Great  Elm,  under  which  the  Revolution- 
ary patriots  had  met,  was  still  standing  on 
Boston  Common.  Daniel  Drew,  the  New  York 
financier,  who  was  born  before  the  American 
Constitution  was  adopted,  was  still  alive;  so 
were  Commodore  Vanderbilt,  Joseph  Henry,  A. 
T.  Stewart,  Thurlow  Weed,  Peter  Cooper, 
Cyrus  McCormick,  Lucretia  Mott,  Bryant, 

[225] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Longfellow,  and  Emerson.  Most  old  people 
could  remember  the  running  of  the  first  railway 
train;  people  of  middle  age  could  remember  the 
sending  of  the  first  telegraph  message;  and 
the  children  in  the  high  schools  remembered  the 
laying  of  the  first  Atlantic  Cable. 

The  grandfathers  of  1876  were  fond  of  telling 
how  Webster  opposed  taking  Texas  and  Oregon 
into  the  Union;  how  George  Washington 
advised  against  including  the  Mississippi  River; 
and  how  Monroe  warned  Congress  that  a 
country  that  reached  from  the  Atlantic  to  the 
Middle  West  was  "too  extensive  to  be  governed 
but  by  a  despotic  monarchy."  They  told  how 
Abraham  Lincoln,  when  he  was  postmaster  of 
New  Salem,  used  to  carry  the  letters  in  his  coon- 
skin  cap  and  deliver  them  at  sight;  how  in  1822 
the  mails  were  carried  on  horseback  and  not  in 
stages,  so  as  to  have  the  quickest  possible  service; 
and  how  the  news  of  Madison's  election  was  three 
weeks  in  reaching  the  people  of  Kentucky. 
When  the  telegraph  was  mentioned,  they  told 
how  in  Revolutionary  days  the  patriots  used  a 
system  of  signalling  called  "Washington's  Tele- 

[226] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

graph,"  consisting  of  a  pole,  a  flag,  a  basket,  and 
a  barrel. 

So,  the  young  Republic  was  still  within 
hearing  distance  of  its  childhood,  in  1876.  Both 
in  sentiment  and  in  methods  of  work  it  was 
living  close  to  the  log-cabin  period.  Many  of 
the  old  slow  ways  survived,  the  ways  that  were 
fast  enough  in  the  days  of  the  stage-coach  and 
the  tinder-box.  There  were  seventy-seven  thou- 
sand miles  of  railway,  but  poorly  built  and  in 
short  lengths.  There  were  manufacturing  in- 
dustries that  employed  two  million,  four  hun- 
dred thousand  people,  but  every  trade  was 
broken  up  into  a  chaos  of  small  competitive 
units,  each  at  war  with  all  the  others.  There 
were  energy  and  enterprise  in  the  highest  degree, 
but  not  efficiency  or  organization.  Little  as  we 
knew  it,  in  1876  we  were  mainly  gathering  to- 
gether the  plans  and  the  raw  materials  for  the 
building  up  of  the  modern  business  world,  with 
its  quick,  tense  life  and  its  national  structure  of 
immense  coordinated  industries. 

In  1876  the  age  of  specialization  and  com- 
munity of  interest  was  in  its  dawn.  The  cobbler 

[227] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

had  given  place  to  the  elaborate  factory,  in  which 
seventy  men  cooperated  to  make  one  shoe.  The 
merchant  who  had  hitherto  lived  over  his  store 
now  ventured  to  have  a  home  in  the  suburbs. 
No  man  was  any  longer  a  self-sufficient  Robin- 
son Crusoe.  He  was  a  fraction,  a  single  part  of 
a  social  mechanism,  who  must  necessarily  keep 
in  the  closest  touch  with  many  others. 

A  new  interdependent  form  of  civilization  was 
about  to  be  developed,  and  the  telephone  arrived 
in  the  nick  of  time  to  make  this  new  civilization 
workable  and  convenient.  It  was  the  unfolding 
of  a  new  organ.  Just  as  the  eye  had  become  the 
telescope,  and  the  hand  had  become  machinery, 
and  the  feet  had  become  railways,  so  the  voice 
became  the  telephone.  It  was  a  new  ideal 
method  of  communication  that  had  been  made 
indispensable  by  new  conditions.  The  prophecy 
of  Carlyle  had  come  true,  when  he  said  that  "men 
cannot  now  be  bound  to  men  by  brass  collars; 
you  will  have  to  bind  them  by  other  far  nobler 
and  cunninger  methods." 

Railways  and  steamships  had  begun  this  work 
[  228  ] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

of  binding  man  to  man  by  "nobler  and  cunninger 
methods."  The  telegraph  and  cable  had  gone 
still  farther  and  put  all  civilized  people  within 
sight  of  each  other,  so  that  they  could  commu- 
nicate by  a  sort  of  deaf  and  dumb  alphabet.  And 
then  came  the  telephone,  giving  direct  instan- 
taneous communication  and  putting  the  people 
of  each  nation  within  hearing  distance  of  each 
other.  It  was  the  completion  of  a  long  series  of 
inventions.  It  was  the  keystone  of  the  arch.  It 
was  the  one  last  improvement  that  enabled  inter- 
dependent nations  to  handle  themselves  and  to 
hold  together. 

To  make  railways  and  steamboats  carry  letters 
was  much,  in  the  evolution  of  the  means  of  com- 
munication. To  make  the  electric  wire  carry 
signals  was  more,  because  of  the  instantaneous 
transmission  of  important  news.  But  to  make 
the  electric  wire  carry  speech  was  most,  because 
it  put  all  fellow-citizens  face  to  face,  and 
made  both  message  and  answer  instantaneous. 
The  invention,  of  the  telephone  taught  the  Genie 
of  Electricity  to  do  better  than  to  carry  mes- 

[229] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

sages  in  the  sign  language  of  the  dumb.  It 
taught  him  to  speak.  As  Emerson  has  finely 
said: 

"We  had  letters  to  send.  Couriers  could  not  go  fast 
enough,  nor  far  enough ;  broke  their  wagons,  foundered 
their  horses ;  bad  roads  in  Spring,  snowdrifts  in  Winter, 
heat  in  Summer  —  could  not  get  their  horses  out  of  a 
walk.  But  we  found  that  the  air  and  the  earth  were 
full  of  electricity,  and  always  going  our  way,  just  the 
way  we  wanted  to  send.  Would  he  take  a  message? 
Just  as  lief  as  not ;  had  nothing  else  to  do ;  would  carry 
it  in  no  time." 

As  to  the  exact  value  of  the  telephone  to  the 
United  States  in  dollars  and  cents,  no  one  can 
tell.  One  statistician  has  given  us  a  total  of 
three  million  dollars  a  day  as  the  amount  saved 
by  using  telephones.  This  sum  may  be  far  too 
high,  or  too  low.  It  can  be  no  more  than  a 
guess.  The  only  adequate  way  to  arrive  at  the 
value  of  the  telephone  is  to  consider  the  nation  as 
a  whole,  to  take  it  all  in  all  as  a  going  concern, 
and  to  note  that  such  a  nation  would  be  abso- 
lutely impossible  without  its  telephone  service. 
Some  sort  of  a  slower  and  lower  grade  republic 
we  might  have,  with  small  industrial  units,  long 

[230] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

hours  of  labor,  lower  wages,  and  clumsier  ways. 
The  money  loss  would  be  enormous,  but  more 
serious  still  would  be  the  loss  in  the  quality  of 
the  national  life.  Inevitably,  an  untelephoned 
nation  is  less  social,  less  unified,  less  progressive, 
and  less  efficient.  It  belongs  to  an  inferior 
species. 

How  to  make  a  civilization  that  is  organized 
and  quick,  instead  of  a  barbarism  that  was 
chaotic  and  slow  —  that  is  the  universal  human 
problem,  not  wholly  solved  to-day.  And  how  to 
develop  a  science  of  intercommunication,  which 
commenced  when  the  wild  animals  began  to 
travel  in  herds  and  to  protect  themselves  from 
their  enemies  by  a  language  of  danger-signals, 
and  to  democratize  this  science  until  the  entire 
nation  becomes  self-conscious  and  able  to  act  as 
one  living  being  —  that  is  the  part  of  this  uni- 
versal problem  which  finally  necessitated  the  in- 
vention of  the  telephone. 

With  the  use  of  the  telephone  has  come  a  new 
habit  of  mind.  The  slow  and  sluggish  mood  has 
been  sloughed  off.  The  old  to-morrow  habit  has 
been  superseded  by  "Do  It  To-day";  and  life 

[231] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

has  become  more  tense,  alert,  vivid.  The  brain 
has  been  relieved  of  the  suspense  of  waiting  for 
an  answer,  which  is  a  psychological  gain  of  great 
importance.  It  receives  its  reply  at  once  and  is 
set  free  to  consider  other  matters.  There  is  less 
burden  upon  the  memory  and  the  whole  mind  can 
be  given  to  each  new  proposition. 

A  new  instinct  of  speed  has  been  developed, 
much  more  fully  in  the  United  States  than  else- 
where. "No  American  goes  slow,"  said  Ian 
Maclaren,  "if  he  has  the  chance  of  going  fast; 
he  does  not  stop  to  talk  if  he  can  talk  walking; 
and  he  does  not  walk  if  he  can  ride."  He  is  as 
pleased  as  a  child  with  a  new  toy  when  some 
speed  record  is  broken,  when  a  pair  of  shoes  is 
made  in  eleven  minutes,  when  a  man  lays  twelve 
hundred  bricks  in  an  hour,  or  when  a  ship  crosses 
the  Atlantic  in  four  and  a  half  days.  Even  sec- 
onds are  now  counted  and  split  up  into  fractions. 
The  average  time,  for  instance,  taken  to  reply 
to  a  telephone  call  by  a  New  York  operator,  is 
now  three  and  two-fifth  seconds;  and  even  this 
tiny  atom  of  time  is  being  strenuously  worn 
down. 

[232] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

As  a  witty  Frenchman  has  said,  one  of  our 
most  lively  regrets  is  that  while  we  are  at  the 
telephone  we  cannot  do  business  with  our  feet. 
We  regard  it  as  a  victory  over  the  hostility  of 
nature  when  we  do  an  hour's  work  in  a  minute 
or  a  minute's  work  in  a  second.  Instead  of  say- 
ing, as  the  Spanish  do,  "Life  is  too  short;  what 
can  one  person  do?"  an  American  is  more  apt  to 
say,  "Life  is  too  short;  therefore  I  must  do  to- 
day's work  to-day."  To  pack  a  lifetime  with 
energy  —  that  is  the  American  plan,  and  so  to 
economize  that  energy  as  to  get  the  largest  re- 
sults. To  get  a  question  asked  and  answered  in 
five  minutes  by  means  of  an  electric  wire,  instead 
of  in  two  hours  by  the  slow  trudging  of  a  mes- 
senger boy  — that  is  the  method  that  best  suits 
our  passion  for  instantaneous  service. 

It  is  one  of  the  few  social  laws  of  which  we  are 
fairly  sure,  that  a  nation  organizes  in  proportion 
to  its  velocity.  We  know  that  a  four-mile-an- 
hour  nation  must  remain  a  huge  inert  mass  of 
peasants  and  villagers;  or  if,  after  centuries  of 
slow  toil,  it  should  pile  up  a  great  city,  the  city 
will  sooner  or  later  fall  to  pieces  of  its  own 

[233] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

weight.  In  such  a  way  Babylon  rose  and  fell, 
and  Nineveh,  and  Thebes,  and  Carthage,  and 
Rome.  Mere  bulk,  unorganized,  becomes  its 
own  destroyer.  It  dies  of  clogging  and  con- 
gestion. But  when  Stephenson's  Rocket  ran 
twenty-nine  miles  an  hour,  and  Morse's  tele- 
graph clicked  its  signals  from  Washington  to 
Baltimore,  and  Bell's  telephone  flashed  the  vi- 
brations of  speech  between  Boston  and  Salem, 
a  new  era  began.  In  came  the  era  of  speed  and 
the  finely  organized  nations.  In  came  cities  of 
unprecedented  bulk,  but  held  together  so  closely 
by  a  web-work  of  steel  rails  and  copper  wires 
that  they  have  become  more  alert  and  coopera- 
tive than  any  tiny  hamlet  of  mud  huts  on  the 
banks  of  the  Congo. 

That  the  telephone  is  now  doing  most  of  all, 
in  this  binding  together  of  all  manner  of  men, 
is  perhaps  not  too  much  to  claim,  when  we  re- 
member that  there  are  now  in  the  United  States 
seventy  thousand  holders  of  Bell  telephone  stock 
and  ten  million  users  of  telephone  service. 
There  are  two  hundred  and  sixty-four  wires 
crossing  the  Mississippi,  in  the  Bell  system;  and 

[284] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

five  hundred  and  forty-four  crossing  Mason  and 
Dixon's  Line.  It  is  the  telephone  which  does 
most  to  link  together  cottage  and  skyscraper 
and  mansion  and  factory  and  farm.  It  is  not 
limited  to  experts  or  college  graduates.  It 
reaches  the  man  with  a  nickel  as  well  as  the  man 
with  a  million.  It  speaks  all  languages  and 
serves  all  trades.  It  helps  to  prevent  section- 
alism and  race  feuds.  It  gives  a  common  meet- 
ing place  to  capitalists  and  wage-workers.  It 
is  so  essentially  the  instrument  of  all  the  people, 
in  fact,  that  we  might  almost  point  to  it  as  a 
national  emblem,  as  the  trade-mark  of  democracy 
and  the  American  spirit. 

In  a  country  like  ours,  where  there  are  eighty 
nationalities  in  the  public  schools,  the  telephone 
has  a  peculiar  value  as  a  part  of  the  national 
digestive  apparatus.  It  prevents  the  growth  of 
dialects  and  helps  on  the  process  of  assimilation. 
Such  is  the  push  of  American  life,  that  the  hum- 
ble immigrants  from  Southern  Europe,  before 
they  have  been  here  half  a  dozen  years,  have  ac- 
quired the  telephone  habit  and  have  linked  on 
their  small  shops  to  the  great  wire  network  of 

[235] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

intercommunication.  In  the  one  community  of 
Brownsville,  for  example,  settled  several  years 
ago  by  an  overflow  of  Russian  Jews  from  the 
East  Side  of  New  York,  there  are  now  as  many 
telephones  as  in  the  kingdom  of  Greece.  And 
in  the  swarming  East  Side  itself,  there  is  a  sin- 
gle exchange  in  Orchard  Street  which  has  more 
wires  than  there  are  in  all  the  exchanges  of 
Egypt. 

There  can  be  few  higher  ideals  of  practical 
democracy  than  that  which  comes  to  us  from  the 
telephone  engineer.  His  purpose  is  much  more 
comprehensive  than  the  supplying  of  telephones 
to  those  who  want  them.  It  is  rather  to  make 
the  telephone  as  universal  as  the  water  faucet, 
to  bring  within  speaking  distance  every  economic 
unit,  to  connect  to  the  social  organism  every  per- 
son who  may  at  any  time  be  needed.  Just  as  the 
click  of  the  reaper  means  bread,  and  the  purr 
of  the  sewing-machine  means  clothes,  and  the 
roar  of  the  Bessemer  converter  means  steel,  and 
the  rattle  of  the  press  means  education,  so  the 
ring  of  the  telephone  bell  has  come  to  mean  unity 
and  organization. 

[236] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

Already,  by  cable,  telegraph,  and  telephone, 
no  two  towns  in  the  civilized  world  are  more 
than  one  hour  apart.  We  have  even  girdled  the 
earth  with  a  cablegram  in  twelve  minutes.  We 
have  made  it  possible  for  any  man  in  New  York 
City  to  enter  into  conversation  with  any  other 
New  Yorker  in  twenty-one  seconds.  We  have 
not  been  satisfied  with  establishing  such  a  system 
of  transportation  that  we  can  start  any  day  for 
anywhere  from  anywhere  else;  neither  have  we 
been  satisfied  with  establishing  such  a  system 
of  communication  that  news  and  gossip  are  the 
common  property  of  all  nations.  We  have  gone 
farther.  We  have  established  in  every  large 
region  of  population  a  system  of  voice-nerves 
that  puts  every  man  at  every  other  man's  ear, 
and  which  so  magically  eliminates  the  factor  of 
distance  that  the  United  States  becomes  three 
thousand  miles  of  neighbors,  side  by  side. 

This  effort  to  conquer  Time  and  Space  is 
above  all  else  the  instinct  of  material  progress. 
To  shrivel  up  the  miles  and  to  stretch  out  the 
minutes  —  this  has  been  one  of  the  master  pas- 
sions of  tl: :  human  race.  And  thus  the  larger 

[237] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

truth  about  the  telephone  is  that  it  is  vastly  more 
than  a  mere  convenience.  It  is  not  to  be  classed 
with  safety  razors  and  piano  players  and  foun- 
tain pens.  It  is  nothing  less  than  the  high-speed 
tool  of  civilization,  gearing  up  the  whole  mechan- 
ism to  more  effective  social  service.  It  is  the 
symbol  of  national  efficiency  and  cooperation. 

All  this  the  telephone  is  doing,  at  a  total  cost 
to  the  nation  of  probably  $200,000,000  a  year  — 
no  more  than  American  farmers  earn  in  ten  days. 
We  pay  the  same  price  for  it  as  we  do  for  the 
potatoes,  or  for  one-third  of  the  hay  crop,  or  for 
one-eighth  of  the  corn.  Out  of  every  nickel 
spent  for  electrical  service,  one  cent  goes  to  the 
telephone.  We  could  settle  our  telephone  bill, 
and  have  several  millions  left  over,  if  we  cut  off 
every  fourth  glass  of  liquor  and  smoke  of  to- 
baecb.? '^Whoever  rents  a  typewriting  machine, 
or  uses  a  street  car  twice  a  day,  or  has  his  shoes 
polished  once  a  day,  may  for  the  same  expense 
have  a  very  good  telephone  service.  Merely  to 
shovel  away  the  snow  of  a  single  storm  in  1910 
cost  the  city  government  of  New  York  as  much 
as  it  will  pay  for  five  or  six  years  of  telephoning. 


A  SUBWAY  LAID  WITHOUT  BOTTOM  CONCRETE 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     T  E  L^PM  0  N'E 

This  almost  incredible  cheapness;  of  telephony- 
is  still  far  from  being  generally  perceived,  mainly, 
for  psychological  reasons.  A  telephone  is  not 
impressive.  It  has  no  bulk.  It  is  not  like  the 
Singer  Building  or  the  Lusittwiia*  Its  wires  and 
switchboards  and  batteries  are  scattered  and: 
hidden,  and  few  have  sufficient  imagination  to 
picture  them  in  all  their  complexity.  If  only  it 
were  possible  to  assemble  the  hundred  or  more 
telephone  buildings  of  New  York  in  one  vast 
plaza,  and  if  the  two  thousand  clerks  and  three 
thousand  maintenance  men  and  six  thousand* 
girl  operators  were  to  march  to  work  each  morn- 
ing with bands  and  ;jbaiiners,  then>  perhaps,  there 
might  be  the  necessary  quality  of  impressiveness 
by  which  any  large  idea  must  always  be  imparted 
to  the  public  mipdr-i-uf  arli  vd  ahum  3137^  ee>imt 

For  lack  of  a  seven  and  one:half  cent  .coin, 
there  is  now  five-cent  telepho^jf,  r£#§q  iaB  the 
largest  American  cities.  For  five  cents  whoever 
wishes  has  an  entire  wire-system  at  his  service, 
a  system  that- &  kept  waiting!  ifey?  day  iand  nighty 
so  that  it  will -be  ready  the  infttaoit  >he  vneeds^iU 
This  system  may  have  cost;  from  twenty  to  fifty 

[239] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

millions,  yet  it  may  be  hired  for  one-eighth  the 
cost  of  renting  an  automobile.  Even  in  long- 
distance telephony,  the  expense  of  a  message 
dwindles  when  it  is  compared  with  the  price  of  a 
return  railway  ticket.  A  talk  from  New  York 
to  Philadelphia,  for  instance,  costs  seventy-five 
cents,  while  the  railway  fare  would  be  four  dol- 
lars. From  New  York  to  Chicago  a  talk  costs 
five  dollars  as  against  seventy  dollars  by  rail. 
As  Harriman  once  said,  "I  can't  get  from  my 
home  to  the  depot  for  the  price  of  a  talk  to 
Omaha." 

To  say  what  the  net  profits  have  been,  to  the 
entire  body  of  people  who  have  invested  money 
in  the  telephone,  will  always  be  more  or  less  of 
a  guess.  The  general  belief  that  immense  for- 
tunes were  made  by  the  lucky  holders  of  Bell 
stock,  is  an  exaggeration  that  has  been  kept  alive 
by  the  promoters  of  wildcat  companies.  No 
such  fortunes  were  made.  "I  do  not  believe," 
says  Theodore  Vail,  "that  any  one  man  ever 
made  a  clear  million  out  of  the  telephone." 
There  are  not  apt  to  be  any  get-rich-quick  for- 

[240] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

tunes  made  in  corporations  that  issue  no  watered 
stock  and  do  not  capitalize  their  franchises.  On 
the  contrary,  up  to  1897,  the  holders  of  stock  in 
the  Bell  Companies  had  paid  in  four  million, 
seven  hundred  thousand  dollars  more  than  the 
par  value;  and  in  the  recent  consolidation  of 
Eastern  companies,  under  the  presidency  of 
Union  N.  Bethell,  the  new  stock  was  actually 
eight  millions  less  than  the  stock  that  was  re- 
tired. 

Few  telephone  companies  paid  any  profits  at 
first.  They  had  undervalued  the  cost  of  building 
and  maintenance.  Denver  expected  the  cost  to 
be  two  thousand,  five  hundred  dollars  and  spent 
sixty  thousand  dollars.  Buffalo  expected  to  pay 
three  thousand  dollars  and  had  to  pay  one  hun- 
dred and  fifty  thousand  dollars.  Also, they  made 
the  unwelcome  discovery  that  an  exchange  of 
two  hundred  costs  more  than  twice  as  much  as 
an  exchange  of  one  hundred,  because  of  the 
greater  amount  of  traffic.  Usually  a  dollar  that 
is  paid  to  a  telephone  company  is  divided  as  fol- 
lows: 

[241] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 


nO  itfr-iiUti  ^Ilfc1fc|if'./  Mrt  oh       . 

Interest  ...........  ......        6c 

ni  ^*0"     M  «T<     T  oi  qu  //'*£i* 


**    16c 


L  3,1)  or 
'io  noimDJiue/uVj  "fnVobi"  sfli  */u  "Boa  ;t>uT 


been  legion)   have  arisen  because  the  telephone 
business,  was  pot  understood.     In  fact,  until  re- 

sliancj  itself.  It  persisted 
ing  to  a  local  and  individualistic  view  of 
i8teW  ^JEWti  trfephones  in 
Jf  e^pgpted  every  instru- 
hfe  WWWl^tates,  both  the 
telephpne  men  and  the  public  overlooked  the 
most  vital  fact  in  the  case,  which  is  that  the  mem- 

to  We  abPve  aU  else 
(fmiMIUd  ono  lo  ay,- 


T  a 

finger  that  is  severed  from  a  hand.     It  is  not 
even  ornamental  or  adaptable  to  any  other  pur- 

[242] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

pose.  It  is  not  at  all  like  a  piano  or  a  talking- 
machine,  which  has  a  separate  existence.  It  is 
useful  only  in  proportion  to  the  number  of  other 
telephones  it  reaches.  And  every  telephone  any- 
where  adds  value  to  every  other  telephone  on  the 
same  system  of  wires.  That,  in  a  sentence,  is 
the  keynote  of  equitable  rates. 

Many  a  telephone,  for  the  general  good,  must 
be  put  where  it  does  not  earn  its  own  living. 
At  any  time  some  sudden  emergency  may  arise 
that  will  make  it  for  the  moment  priceless.  Es- 
pecially since  the  advent  of  the  automobile,  there 
is  no  nook  or  corner  from  which  it  may  not  be 
supremely  necessary,  now  and  then,  to  send  a 
message.  This  principle  was  acted  upon  re- 
cently in  a  most  practical  way  by  the  Pennsyl- 
vania Railroad,  which  at  its  own  expense 
installed  five  hundred  and  twenty-five  telephones 
in  the  homes  of  its  workmen  in  Altoona.  In 
the  same  way,  it  is  clearly  the  social  duty  of  the 
telephone  company  to  widen  out  its  system  until 
every  point  is  covered,  and  then  to  distribute  its 
gross  charges  as  fairly  as  it  can.  The  whole 
must  carry  the  whole  —  that  is  the  philosophy 

[243] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

of  rates  which  must  f  -%  be  recognized  by 
legislatures  and  telephone  coi.  janies  alike.  It 
can  never,  of  course,  be  reduced  to  a  system  or 
formula.  It  will  always  be  a  myU^  of  opinion 
and  compromise,  requiring  much  si  1  much 

patience.     But  there  will  seldom  1  serious 

trouble  when  once  its  basic  p3,  iL;les  are 
understood. 

Like  all  time-saving  inventions,  like  the  rail- 
road, the  reaper,  and  the  Bessemer  converter, 
the  telephone,  in  the  last  analysis,  costs  nothing; 
it  is  the  lack  of  it  that  costs.  The  nation  that 
pays  most  is  the  nation  that  is  without  it. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  TELEPHONE  IN  FOREIGN  COUNTRIES 

HE  telephone  was  nearly  a  year  old  before 
*•  Europe  was  aware  of  its  existence.  It 
received  no  public  notice  of  any  kind  whatever 
until  March  3,  1877,  when  the  London  Athen- 
ceum  mentioned  it  in  a  few  careful  sentences. 
It  was  not  welcomed,  except  by  those  who  wished 
an  evening's  entertainment.  And  to  the  entire 
commercial  world  it  was  for  four  or  five  years 
a  sort  of  scientific  Billiken,  that  never  could  be 
of  any  service  to  serious  people. 

One  after  another,  several  American  enthusi- 
asts rushed  posthaste  to  Europe,  with  dreams 
of  eager  nations  clamoring  for  telephone  sys- 
tems, and  one  after  another  they  failed.  Fred- 
erick A.  Gower  was  the  first  of  these.  He  was 
an  adventurous  chevalier  of  business  who  gave 
up  an  agent's  contract  in  return  for  a  right  to 
become  a  roving  propagandist.  Later  he  met 

[245] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

a  prima  donna,  fell  in  love  with  and  married  her, 
forsook  telephony  for  ballooning,  and  lost  his 
life  in  attempting  to  fly  across  the  English 

Channel.          IIIY  H:iT€IAlI'J 

Next  went  William  H.  Reynolds,  of  Provi- 

fcMiiirx'jo'j  vTDisflo'i  xj  yrxou'ir-UOT  airr 
dence,  who  had  bought  five-eights  of  the  British 

patent  for  five  thousand  dollars,  and  half  the 
right  to  Russia,  Spain,  Portugal,  and  Italy  for 
two  thousand,  five  hundred  dollars.  How  he  was 
received  may  be  seen  from  a  letter  of  his  which 
has  ^e^^^^k^'^f^^^^OTk^g  in 

tetim^t*^ 

been  to  the  Bank  of  England  and  elsewhere  ;  and 
I  have  not  found  one  man  'who  will  put  one  shil- 
Hyta  ffie^ele^one." 

Bell  himself  hurried  to  England  and   Scot- 

,n.vith  great  ex- 
ciated  in 
point  of 
e  re- 

nti-acts  ;  and 
es  an  impoverished 
.     f  fertile    optimistic 
father-in-law, 


'''*^!!!^.     H 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

threw  himself  against  the  European  Inertia  and 
organized  the  International  and  Oriental  Tele- 
phone Companies,  which  came  to  nothing  of  any 
importance.  In  the  same  year  even  Enos  M. 
Barton,  the  sagacious  founder  of  the  Western 
Electric,  went  to  France  and  England  to  estabr 
lish  an  export  trade  in  telephones,  and  failed. 

These  able  men  found  their  plans  thwarted 
by  the  indifference  of  the  public,  and  often  by 
open  hostility*  "The  telephone. is  little  better 
than  a  toy,"  said  the  Saturday  Review;  "it 
amazes  ignorant  people  for  a  moment,  but  it  is 
inferior  to  the  well-established  system  of  air- 
tubes."  "What  will  become  of  the  privacy  of 
life?"  asked  another  London  editor.  "What 
will  become  of  the  sanctity  of  the  domestic 
hearth?"  Writers  vied  with  each  other  in  in- 
venting methods  of  pooh-poohing  Bell  and  his 
invention.  "It  is  ridiculously  simple,"  said  one. 
"It  is  only  an  electrical  speaking-tube,"  said  an- 
other. "It  is  a  complicated  form  of  speaking- 
trumpet,"  said  a  third.  No  British  editor  could 
at  first  conceive  of  any  use  for  the  telephone, 
except  for  divers  and  coal  miners.  The  price, 

[247] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

too,  created  a  general  outcry.  Floods  of  toy 
telephones  were  being  sold  on  the  streets  at  a 
shilling  apiece;  and  although  the  Government 
was  charging  sixty  dollars  a  year  for  the  use  of 
its  printing-telegraphs,  people  protested  loudly 
against  paying  half  as  much  for  telephones. 
As  late  as  1882,  Herbert  Spencer  writes:  "The 
telephone  is  scarcely  used  at  all  in  London,  and 
is  unknown  in  the  other  English  cities." 

The  first  man  of  consequence  to  befriend 
the  telephone  was  Lord  Kelvin,  then  an  untitled 
young  scientist.  He  had  seen  the  original  tele- 
phones at  the  Centennial  in  Philadelphia,  and 
was  so  fascinated  with  them  that  the  impulsive 
Bell  had  thrust  them  into  his  hands  as  a  gift. 
At  the  next  meeting  of  the  British  Association 
for  the  Advancement  of  Science,  Lord  Kelvin 
exhibited  these.  He  did  more.  He  became  the 
champion  of  the  telephone.  He  staked  his  rep- 
utation upon  it.  He  told  the  story  of  the  tests 
made  at  the  Centennial,  and  assured  the  sceptical 
scientists  that  he  had  not  been  deceived.  "All 
this  my  own  ears  heard,"  he  said,  "spoken  to 

[248] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

me  with  unmistakable  distinctness  by  this  cir- 
cular disc  of  iron." 

The  scientists  and  electrical  er^  •  were,  for 
the  most  part,  split  u^  into  two  .  Some 

of  them  said  the  telephone  was  im  jle,  while 
others  said  that  "nothing  could  simpler." 
Almost  all  were  agreed  that  what  1-  ell  had  done 
was  a  humorous  trifle.  But  Lord  KelT  i  per- 
sisted. He  hammered  the  truth  horn  that  the 
telephone  was  "one  of  the  most  interesting  in- 
ventions that  has  ever  been  made  :  '^'^tory 
of  science."  He  gave  a  demonstration  with  one 
end  of  the  wire  in  a  coal  mine.  He  stood  side 
by  side  with  Bell  at  a  public  meeting  in  Glasgow, 
and  declared : 

"The  things  that  were  called  telephones  before 
Bell  were  as  different  from  Bell's  telephone  as  a 
series  of  hand-claps  are  different  from  tne  human 
voice.  They  were  in  fact  electrical  claps ;  while 
Bell  conceived  the  idea  —  the  wholly  original  and 
novel  idea  —  of  giving  continuity  to  the  shocks, 
so  as  to  perfectly  reproduce  the  human  voice." 

One  by  one  the  scientists  were  forced  to  take 

[249] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

the  telephone  seriously.  At  a  public  test  there 
was  one  noted  professor  who  still  stood  in  the 
ranks  of  the  4oubters,  He  was  asked  to  send 
a  message,  .He  went  to  ^  the  instrument  with  a 
grin  of  ineuedulity,  and  thinking  the  whole  ex- 
hibition a  joke,  shouted  into  the  mouthpiece: 
"Hi  diddle  diddle  —  follow  up  that."  Then  he 
listened  for  an  answer.  The  look  on  his  face 
changed  to  one  of  the  utmost  amazement.  "It 
says  — 'The  cat  and  the  fiddle,'  "  he  gasped,  and 
forth  with,  he -became  a  convert  to  telephony.  By 
such  tests  the  men  of  science  were  won  over,  and 
by  the  middle  of  18^7: -Bell  received  a  "vociferous 
welcome"  when  he  addressed  them  at  their  an- 
nual convention  at  Plymouth.  ;  fvnafoab  him 
Soon  afterwards,  The  London  Times  surren- 
der$d^nrjjt  whirled  right-about-face  and  praised 
the  telephone  to  the  iskies.  "Suddenly  and 
quietly  the  whole  human  race  is  brought  within 
speaking  and  hearing  distance,"  it  exclaimed; 
"scarcely  anything  was  more  desired  and  more 
impossible."  :  The  next  paper  to,  quit  the  mob 
of  scoffers,  was  the  .T-atler,  which  said  in  an 
editorial  peroration,  "We  cannot  but  feel  im- 

[250] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

pressed  by  the  picture  of  a  human  child  com- 
manding the  subtlest  and  strongest  force  in  Na- 
ture to  carry,  like  a  slave,  some  whisper  around 
the  world;" 

Closely  after  the  scientists  and  editors  came 
the  nobility.  The  Earl  of  Caithness  led  the 
way.  He  declared  in  public  that  "the  telephone 
is  the  most  extraordinary  thing  I  ever  saw  in 
my  life."  And  one  wintry  morning  in  1878 
Queen  Victoria  drove  to  the  house  of  Sir  Thomas 
Biddulph,  in  London,  and  for  an  hour  talked 
and  listened  by  telephone  to  Kate  Field,  who  -sat 
in  a  Downing  Street  office.  Miss  Field  sang 
"Kathleen  Mavourneen,"  and  the  Queen  thanked 
her  by  telephone,  saying  she  was  "immensely 
pleased."  She  congratulated  Bell  himself ,  who 
was  present,  and  asked  if  she  might  be  permitted 
to  buy  the  two  telephones;  whereupon  Bell  pre- 
sented her  with  a  pair  done  in  ivory!5  0(*  °*  b3*ri.up 

This  incident,  as  may  be  imagined,  did  much 
to  establish  the  reputation  of  telephony  in  Great 
Britain.  A  wire  was  at  once  strung  to  Windsor^ 
Castle.  Others  were  ordered  by  the  Daily 
News,  the  Persian  Ainibas&ador^  and  five  or  six 

[251] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

lords  and  baronets.  Then  came  an  order  which 
raised  the  hopes  of  the  telephone  men  to  the 
highest  heaven,  from  the  banking  house  of  J. 
S.  Morgan  &  Co.  It  was  the  first  recogni- 
tion from  the  "seats  of  the  mighty"  in  the  busi- 
ness and  financial  world.  A  tiny  exchange, 
with  ten  wires,  was  promptly  started  in  Lon- 
don; and  on  April  24,  1879,  Theodore  Vail,  the 
young  manager  of  the  Bell  Company,  sent  an  or- 
der to  the  factory  in  Boston,  "Please  make  one 
hundred  hand  telephones  for  export  trade  as  early 
as  possible."  The  foreign  trade  had  begun. 

Then  there  came  a  thunderbolt  out  of  a  blue 
sky,  a  wholly  unforeseen  disaster.  Just  as  a  few 
energetic  companies  were  sprouting  up,  the 
Postmaster  General  suddenly  proclaimed  that 
the  telephone  was  a  species  of  telegraph.  Ac- 
cording to  a  British  law  the  telegraph  was  re- 
quired to  be  a  Government  monopoly.  This  law 
had  been  passed  six  years  before  the  telephone 
was  born,  but  no  matter.  The  telephone  men 
protested  and  argued.  Tyndall  and  Lord  Kel- 
vin warned  the  Government  that  it  was  mak- 
ing an  indefensible  mistake.  But  nothing  could 

[252] 


EXTERIOR    OF    NEW    CHINESE    TELEPHONE    EXCHANGE,    SAN 


FRANCISCO 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

be  done.  Just  as  the  first  railways  had  been 
called  toll-roads,  so  the  telephone  was  solemnly 
declared  to  be  a  telegraph.  Also,  to  add  to  the 
absurd  humor  of  the  situation,  Judge  Stephen, 
of  the  High  Court  of  Justice,  spoke  the  final 
word  that  compelled  the  telephone  legally  to  be 
a  telegraph,  and  sustained  his  opinion  by  a  quo- 
tation from  Webster's  Dictionary,  which  was 
published  twenty  years  before  the  telephone  was 
invented. 

Having  captured  this  new  rival,  what  next? 
The  Postmaster  General  did  not  know.  He 
had,  of  course,  no  experience  in  telephony,  and 
neither  had  any  of  his  officials  in  the  telegraph 
department.  There  was  no  book  and  no  college 
to  instruct  him.  His  telegraph  was  then,  as  it 
is  to-day,  a  business  failure.  It  was  not  earning 
its  keep.  Therefore  he  did  not  dare  to  shoulder 
the  risk  of  constructing  a  second  system  of  wires, 
arid  at  last  consented  to  give  licenses  to  private 
companies. 

But  the  muddle  continued.  In  order  to  com- 
pel competition,  according  to  the  academic 
theories  of  the  day,  licenses  were  given  to  thir- 

[253] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

teen  private  companies.  As  might  have  been 
expected,  the  ablest  company  quickly  swallowed 
the  other  twelve.  If  it  had  been  let  alone,  this 
company  might  have  given  good  service,  but  it 
was  hobbled  and  fenced  in  by  jealous  regula- 
tions. It  was  compelled  to  pay  one-tenth  of  its 
gross  earnings  to  the  Post  Office.  It  was  to  hold 
itself  ready  to  sell  out  at  six  months'  notice. 
And  as  soon  as  it  had  strung  a  long-distance 
system  of  wires,  the  Postmaster  General  pounced 
down  upon  it  and  took  it  away. 

Then,  in  1900,  the  Post  Office  tossed  aside  all 
obligations  to  the  licensed  company,  and  threw 
open  the  door  to  a  free-for-all  competition.  It 
undertook  to  start  a  second  system  in  London, 
and  in  two  years  discovered  its  blunder  and  pro- 
posed to  cooperate.  It  granted  licenses  to  five 
cities  that  demanded  municipal  ownership. 
These  cities  set  out  bravely,  with  loud  beating  of 
drums,  plunged  from  one  mishap  to  another,  and 
finally  quit.  Even  Glasgow,  the  premier  city 
of  municipal  ownership,  met  its  Waterloo  in  the 
telephone.  It  spent  one  million,  eight  hundred 
thousand  dollars  on  a  plant  that  was  obsolete 

[254] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

when  it  was  new,  ran  it  for  a  time  at  a  loss,  and 
then  sold  it  to  the  Post  Office  in  1906  for  one 
million,  five  hundred  and  twenty-five  thousand 
dollars. 

So,  from  first  to  last,  the  story  of  the  telephone 
in  Great  Britain  has  been  a  "comedy  of  errors." 
There  are  now,  in  the  two  islands,  not  six  hun- 
dred thousand  telephones  in  use.  London,  with 
its  six  hundred  and  forty  square  miles  of  houses, 
has  one-quarter  of  these,  and  is  gaining  at  the 
rate  of  ten  thousand  a  year.  No  large  im- 
provements are  under  way,  as  the  Post  Office 
has  given  notice  that  it  will  take  over  and  operate 
all  private  companies  on  New  Year's  Day,  1912. 
The  bureaucratic  muddle,  so  it  seems,  is  to  con- 
tinue indefinitely. 

In  Germany  there  has  been  the  same  burden 
of  bureaucracy,  but  less  backing  and  filling. 
There  is  a  complete  government  monopoly. 
Whoever  commits  the  crime  of  leasing  telephone 
service  to  his  neighbors  may  be  sent  to  jail  for 
six  months.  Here,  too,  the  Postmaster  General 
has  been  supreme.  He  has  forced  the  telephone 
business  into  a  postal  mould.  The  man  in  a 

[255] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

small  city  must  pay  as  high  a  rate  for  a  small 
service,  as  the  man  in  a  large  city  pays  for  a 
large  service.  There  is  a  fair  degree  of  effi- 
ciency, but  no  high  speed  or  record-breaking. 
The  German  engineers  have  not  kept  in  close 
touch  with  the  progress  of  telephony  in  the 
United  States.  They  have  preferred  to  devise 
methods  of  their  own,  and  so  have  created  a  mis- 
cellaneous assortment  of  systems,  good,  bad,  and 
indifferent.  All  told,  there  is  probably  an  in- 
vestment of  seventy-five  million  dollars  and  a 
total  of  nine  hundred  thousand  telephones. 

Telephony  has  always  been  in  high  favor  with 
the  Kaiser.  It  is  his  custom,  when  planning  a 
hunting  party,  to  have  a  special  wire  strung  to 
the  forest  headquarters,  so  that  he  can  converse 
every  morning  with  his  Cabinet.  He  has  con- 
ferred degrees  and  honors  by  telephone.  Even 
his  former  Chancellor,  Von  Buelow,  received  his 
title  of  Count  in  this  informal  way.  But  the 
first  friend  of  the  telephone  in  Germany  was 
Bismarck.  The  old  Unifier  saw  instantly  its 
value  in  holding  a  nation  together,  and  ordered 
a  line  between  his  palace  in  Berlin  and  his  farm 

[256] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

at  Varzin,  which  lay  two  hundred  and  thirty 
miles  apart.  This  was  as  early  as  the  Fall  of 
1877,  and  was  thus  the  first  long-distance  line  in 
Europe. 

In  France,  as  in  England,  the  Government 
seized  upon  the  telephone  business  as  soon  as  the 
pioneer  work  had  been  done  by  private  citizens. 
In  1889  it  practically  confiscated  the  Paris  sys- 
tem, and  after  nine  years  of  litigation  paid  five 
million  francs  to  its  owners.  With  this  reck- 
less beginning,  it  floundered  from  bad  to  worse. 
It  assembled  the  most  complete  assortment  of 
other  nations'  mistakes,  and  invented  several  of 
its  own.  Almost  every  known  evil  of  bureau- 
cracy was  developed.  The  system  of  rates  was 
turned  upside  down;  the  flat  rate,  which  can  be 
profitably  permitted  in  small  cities  only,  was 
put  in  force  in  the  large  cities,  and  the  message 
rate,  which  is  applicable  only  to  large  cities,  was 
put  in  force  in  small  places.  The  girl  operators 
were  entangled  in  a  maze  of  civil  service  rules. 
They  were  not  allowed  to  marry  without  the 
permission  of  the  Postmaster  General;  and  on 
no  account  might  they  dare  to  marry  a  mayor, 

[257] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

a  policeman,  a  cashier,  or  a  foreigner,  lest  they 
betray  the  secrets  of  the  switchboard. 

There  was  no  national  plan,  no  standardiza- 
tion, no  staff  of  inventors  and  improvers.  Every 
user  was  required  to  buy  his  own  telephone.  As 
George  Ade  has  said,  "Anything  attached  to 
a  wall  is  liable  to  be  a  telephone  in  Paris."  And 
so,  what  with  poor  equipment  and  red  tape,  the 
French  system  became  what  it  remains  to-day, 
the  most  conspicuous  example  of  what  not  to  do 
in  telephony. 

There  are  barely  as  many  telephones  in  the 
whole  of  France  as  ought  normally  to  be  in  the 
city  of  Paris.  There  are  not  as  many  as  are 
now  in  use  in  Chicago.  The  exasperated  Pari- 
sians have  protested.  They  have  presented  a 
petition  with  thirty-two  thousand  names.  They 
have  even  organized  a  "Kickers'  League" —  the 
only  body  of  its  kind  in  any  country  —  to  de- 
mand good  service  at  a  fair  price.  The  daily 
loss  from  bureaucratic  telephony  has  become 
enormous.  "One  blundering  girl  in  a  telephone 
exchange  cost  me  five  thousand  dollars  on  the 
day  of  the  panic  in  1907,"  said  George  Kessler. 

[258] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

But  the  Government  clears  a  net  profit  of  three 
million  dollars  a  year  from  its  telephone  monop- 
oly; and  until  1910,  when  a  committee  of  bet- 
terment was  appointed,  it  showed  no  concern  at 
the  discomfort  of  the  public. 

There  was  one  striking  lesson  in  telephone 
efficiency  which  Paris  received  in  1908,  when  its 
main  exchange  was  totally  destroyed  by  fire. 
"To  build  a  new  switchboard,"  said  European 
manufacturers,  "will  require  four  or  five  months." 
A  hustling  young  Chicagoan  appeared  on  the 
scene.  "We  '11  put  in  a  new  switchboard  in  sixty 
days,"  he  said;  "and  agree  to  forfeit  six  hundred 
dollars  a  day  for  delay."  Such  quick  work  had 
never  been  known.  But  it  was  Chicago's  chance 
to  show  what  she  could  do.  Paris  and  Chicago 
are  four  thousand,  five  hundred  miles  apart,  a 
twelve  days'  journey.  The  switchboard  was  to 
be  a  hundred  and  eighty  feet  in  length,  with 
ten  thousand  wires.  Yet  the  Western  Electric 
finished  it  in  three  weeks.  It  was  rushed  on  six 
freight-cars  to  New  York,  loaded  on  the  French 
steamer  La  Provence,  and  deposited  at  Paris  in 
thirty-six  days ;  so  that  by  the  time  the  sixty  days 

[259] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

had  expired,  it  was  running  full  speed  with  a 
staff  of  ninety  operators. 

Russia  and  Austria-Hungary  have  now  about 
one  hundred  and  twenty-five  thousand  telephones 
apiece.  They  are  neck  and  neck  in  a  race  that 
has  not  at  any  time  been  a  fast  one.  In  each 
country  the  Government  has  been  a  neglectful 
stepmother  to  the  telephone.  It  has  starved  the 
business  with  a  lack  of  capital  and  used  no 
enterprise  in  expanding  it.  Outside  of  Vienna, 
Budapest,  St.  Petersburg,  and  Moscow  there  are 
no  wire-systems  of  any  consequence.  The  po- 
litical deadlock  between  Austria  and  Hungary 
shuts  out  any  immediate  hope  of  a  happier  life 
for  the  telephone  in  those  countries ;  but  in  Rus- 
sia there  has  recently  been  a  change  in  policy 
that  may  open  up  a  new  era.  Permits  are  now 
being  offered  to  one  private  company  in  each 
city,  in  return  for  three  per  cent  of  the  revenue. 
By  this  step  Russia  has  unexpectedly  swept  to 
the  front  and  is  now,  to  telephone  men,  the  freest 
country  in  Europe. 

In  tiny  Switzerland  there  has  been  govern- 
ment ownership  from  the  first,  but  with  less 

[260] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

detriment  to  the  business  than  elsewhere.  Here 
the  officials  have  actually  jilted  the  telegraph  for 
the  telephone.  They  have  seen  the  value  of  the 
talking  wire  to  hold  their  valley  villages  together; 
and  so  have  criss-crossed  the  Alps  with  a  cheap 
and  somewhat  flimsy  system  of  telephony  that 
carries  sixty  million  conversations  a  year.  Even 
the  monks  of  St.  Bernard,  who  rescue  snow- 
bound travellers,  have  now  equipped  their  moun- 
tain with  a  series  of  telephone  booths. 

The  highest  telephone  in  the  world  is  on  the 
peak  of  Monte  Rosa,  in  the  Italian  Alps,  very 
nearly  three  miles  above  the  level  of  the  sea.  It 
is  linked  to  a  line  that  runs  to  Rome,  in  order 
that  a  queen  may  talk  to  a  professor.  In  this 
case  the  Queen  is  Margherita  of  Italy  and  the 
professor  is  Signor  Mosso,  the  astronomer,  who 
studies  the  heavens  from  an  observatory  on 
Monte  Rosa.  At  her  own  expense,  the  Queen 
had  this  wire  strung  by  a  crew  of  linemen,  who 
slipped  and  floundered  on  the  mountain  for  six 
years  before  they  had  it  pegged  in  place.  The 
general  situation  in  Italy  is  like  that  in  Great 
Britain.  The  Government  has  always  monop- 

[261] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

olized  the  long-distance  lines,  and  is  now  about 
to  buy  out  all  private  companies.  There  are 
only  fifty-five  thousand  telephones  to  thirty-two 
million  people  —  as  many  as  in  Norway  and  less 
than  in  Denmark.  And  in  many  of  the  southern 
and  Sicilian  provinces  the  jingle  of  the  telephone 
bell  is  still  an  unfamiliar  sound. 

The  main  peculiarity  in  Holland  is  that  there 
is  no  national  plan,  but  rather  a  patchwork,  that 
resembles  Joseph's  coat  of  many  colors.  Each 
city  engineer  has  designed  his  own  type  of  ap- 
paratus and  had  it  made  to  order.  Also,  each 
company  is  fenced  in  by  law  within  a  six-mile 
circle,  so  that  Holland  is  dotted  with  thumb-nail 
systems,  no  two  of  which  are  alike.  In  Belgium 
there  has  been  a  government  system  since  1893, 
hence  there  is  unity,  but  no  enterprise.  The 
plant  is  old-fashioned  and  too  small.  Spain  has 
private  companies,  which  give  fairly  good  serv- 
ice to  twenty  thousand  people.  Roumania  has 
half  as  many.  Portugal  has  two  small  com- 
panies in  Lisbon  and  Oporto.  Greece,  Servia, 
and  Bulgaria  have  a  scanty  two  thousand  apiece. 
The  frozen  little  isle  of  Iceland  has  one-quarter 

[262] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

as  many ;  and  even  into  Turkey,  which  was  a  for- 
bidden land  under  the  regime  of  the  old  Sultan, 
the  Young  Turks  are  importing  boxes  of  tele- 
phones and  coils  of  copper  wire. 

There  is  one  European  country,  and  only  one, 
which  has  caught  the  telephone  spirit  —  Sweden. 
Here  telephony  had  a  free  swinging  start.  It 
was  let  alone  by  the  Post  Office ;  and  better  still, 
it  had  a  Man,  a  business-builder  of  remarkable 
force  and  ability,  named  Henry  Cedergren. 
Had  this  man  been  made  the  Telephone-Master 
of  Europe,  there  would  have  been  a  different 
story  to  tell.  By  his  insistent  enterprise  he  made 
Stockholm  the  best  telephoned  city  outside  of 
the  United  States.  He  pushed  his  country  for- 
ward until,  having  one  hundred  and  sixty-five 
thousand  telephones,  it  stood  fourth  among  the 
European  nations.  Since  his  death  the  Govern- 
ment has  entered  the  field  with  a  duplicate  sys- 
tem, and  a  war  has  been  begun  which  grows 
yearly  more  costly  and  absurd. 

Asia,  as  yet,  with  her  eight  hundred  and  fifty 
million  people,  has  fewer  telephones  than  Phil- 
adelphia, and  three-fourths  of  them  are  in  the 

[263] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tiny  island  of  Japan.  The  Japanese  were  en- 
thusiastic telephonists  from  the  first.  They  had 
a  busy  exchange  in  Tokio  in  1883.  This  has 
now  grown  to  have  twenty-five  thousand  users, 
and  might  have  more,  if  it  had  not  been  stunted 
by  the  peculiar  policy  of  the  Government.  The 
public  officials  who  operate  the  system  are  able 
men.  They  charge  a  fair  price  and  make  ten 
per  cent  profit  for  the  State.  But  they  do  not 
keep  pace  with  the  demand.  It  is  one  of  the 
oddest  vagaries  of  public  ownership  that  there 
is  now  in  Tokio  a  waiting  list  of  eight  thousand 
citizens,  who  are  offering  to  pay  for  telephones 
and  cannot  get  them.  And  when  a  Tokian  dies, 
his  franchise  to  a  telephone,  if  he  has  one,  is 
usually  itemized  in  his  will  as  a  four-hundred- 
dollar  property. 

India,  which  is  second  on  the  Asiatic  list,  has 
no  more  than  nine  thousand  telephones  —  one  to 
every  thirty-three  thousand  of  her  population! 
Not  quite  so  many,  in  fact,  as  there  are  in  five 
of  the  skyscrapers  of  New  York.  The  Dutch 
East  Indies  and  China  have  only  seven  thou- 
sand apiece,  but  in  China  there  has  recently 

[264] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

come  a  forward  movement.  A  fund  of  twenty 
million  dollars  is  to  be  spent  in  constructing  a 
national  system  of  telephone  and  telegraph. 
Peking  is  now  pointing  with  wonder  and  de- 
light to  a  new  exchange,  spick  and  span,  with 
a  couple  of  ten-thousand-wire  switchboards. 
Others  are  being  built  in  Canton,  Hankow,  and 
Tien-Tsin.  Ultimately,  the  telephone  will  flour- 
ish in  China,  as  it  has  done  in  the  Chinese  quarter 
in  San  Francisco.  The  Empress  of  China,  after 
the  siege  of  Peking,  commanded  that  a  telephone 
should  be  hung  in  her  palace,  within  reach  of  her 
dragon  throne;  and  she  was  very  friendly  with 
any  representative  of  the  "Speaking  Lightning 
Sounds"  business,  as  the  Chinese  term  telephony. 
In  Persia  the  telephone  made  its  entry  recently 
in  true  comic-opera  fashion.  A  new  Shah,  in  an 
outburst  of  confidence,  set  up  a  wire  between 
his  palace  and  the  market-place  in  Teheran,  and 
invited  his  people  to  talk  to  him  whenever  they 
had  grievances.  And  they  talked !  They  talked 
so  freely  and  used  such  language,  that  the  Shah 
ordered  out  his  soldiers  and  attacked  them.  He 
fired  upon  the  new  Parliament,  and  was  at  once 

[265] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

chased  out  of  Persia  by  the  enraged  people. 
From  this  it  would  appear  that  the  telephone 
ought  to  be  popular  in  Persia,  although  at  pres- 
ent there  are  not  more  than  twenty  in  use. 

South  America,  outside  of  Buenos  Ayres,  has 
few  telephones,  probably  not  more  than  thirty 
thousand.  Dom  Pedro  of  Brazil,  who  be- 
friended Bell  at  the  Centennial,  introduced  tele- 
phony into  his  country  in  1881 ;  but  it  has  not 
in  thirty  years  been  able  to  obtain  ten  thousand 
users.  Canada  has  exactly  the  same  number  as 
Sweden  —  one  hundred  and  sixty-five  thousand. 
Mexico  has  perhaps  ten  thousand;  New  Zea- 
land twenty-six  thousand;  and  Australia  fifty- 
five  thousand. 

Far  down  in  the  list  of  continents  stands 
Africa.  Egypt  and  Algeria  have  twelve  thou- 
sand at  the  north;  British  South  Africa  has  as 
many  at  the  south;  and  in  the  vast  stretches  be- 
tween there  are  barely  a  thousand  more. 
Whoever  pushes  into  Central  Africa  will  still 
hear  the  beat  of  the  wooden  drum,  which  is  the 
clattering  sign-language  of  the  natives.  One 
strand  of  copper  wire  there  is,  through  the  Congo 

[266] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

region,  placed  there  by  order  of  the  late  King 
of  Belgium.  To  string  it  was  probably  the  most 
adventurous  piece  of  work  in  the  history  of  tele- 
phone linemen.  There  was  one  seven  hundred 
and  fifty  mile  stretch  of  the  central  jungle. 
There  were  white  ants  that  ate  the  wooden  poles, 
and  wild  elephants  that  pulled  up  the  iron  poles. 
There  were  monkeys  that  played  tag  on  the 
lines,  and  savages  that  stole  the  wire  for  arrow- 
heads. But  the  line  was  carried  through,  and 
to-day  is  alive  with  conversations  concerning  rub- 
ber and  ivory. 

So,  we  may  almost  say  of  the  telephone  that 
"there  is  no  speech  nor  language  where  its  voice 
is  not  heard."  There  are  even  a  thousand  miles 
of  its  wire  in  Abyssinia  and  one  hundred  and 
fifty  miles  in  the  Fiji  Islands.  Roughly  speak- 
ing, there  are  now  ten  million  telephones  in  all 
countries,  employing  two  hundred  and  fifty  thou- 
sand people,  requiring  twenty-one  million  miles 
of  wire,  representing  a  cost  of  fifteen  hundred 
million  dollars,  and  carrying  fourteen  thousand 
million  conversations  a  year.  All  this,  and  yet 
the  men  who  heard  the  first  feeble  cry  of  the  in- 

[267] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

fant  telephone  are  still  alive,  and  not  by  any 
means  old. 

No  foreign  country  has  reached  the  high 
American  level  of  telephony.  The  United 
States  has  eight  telephones  per  hundred  of  pop- 
ulation, while  no  other  country  has  one-half  as 
many.  Canada  stands  second,  with  almost  four 
per  hundred;  and  Sweden  is  third.  Germany 
has  as  many  telephones  as  the  State  of  New 
York;  and  Great  Britain  as  many  as  Ohio. 
Chicago  has  more  than  London;  and  Boston 
twice  as  many  as  Paris.  In  the  whole  of 
Europe,  with  her  twenty  nations,  there  are  one- 
third  as  many  telephones  as  in  the  United  States. 
In  proportion  to  her  population,  Europe  has  only 
one-thirteenth  as  many. 

The  United  States  writes  half  as  many  letters 
as  Europe,  sends  one-third  as  many  telegrams, 
and  talks  twice  as  much  at  the  telephone.  The 
average  European  family  sends  three  telegrams 
a  year,  and  three  letters  and  one  telephone  mes- 
sage a  week ;  while  the  average  American  family 
sends  five  telegrams  a  year,  and  seven  letters  and 
eleven  telephone  messages  a  week.  This  one  na- 

[268] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tion,  which  owns  six  per  cent  of  the  earth  and  is 
five  per  cent  of  the  human  race,  has  seventy 
per  cent  of  the  telephones.  And  fifty  per  cent, 
or  one-half,  of  the  telephony  of  the  world,  is  now 
comprised  in  the  Bell  System  of  this  country. 

There  are  only  six  nations  in  Europe  that  make 
a  fair  showing  —  the  Germans,  British,  Swedish, 
Danes,  Norwegians,  and  Swiss.  The  others  have 
less  than  one  telephone  per  hundred.  Little  Den- 
mark has  more  than  Austria.  Little  Finland  has 
better  service  than  France.  The  Belgian  tele- 
phones have  cost  the  most  —  two  hundred  and 
seventy-three  dollars  apiece;  and  the  Finnish 
telephones  the  least  —  eighty-one  dollars.  But  a 
telephone  in  Belgium  earns  three  times  as  much 
as  one  in  Norway.  In  general,  the  lesson  in 
Europe  is  this,  that  the  telephone  is  what  a  nation 
makes  it.  Its  usefulness  depends  upon  the  sense 
and  enterprise  with  which  it  is  handled.  It  may 
be  either  an  invaluable  asset  or  a  nuisance. 

Too  much  government!  That  has  been  the 
basic  reason  for  failure  in  most  countries.  Be- 
fore the  telephone  was  invented,  the  telegraph 
had  been  made  a  State  monopoly;  and  the  tele- 

[269] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

phone  was  regarded  as  a  species  of  telegraph. 
The  public  officials  did  not  see  that  a  telephone 
system  is  a  highly  complex  and  technical  prob- 
lem, much  more  like  a  piano  factory  or  a  steel- 
mill.  And  so,  wherever  a  group  of  citizens 
established  a  telephone  service,  the  government 
officials  looked  upon  it  with  jealous  eyes,  and 
usually  snatched  it  away.  The  telephone  thus 
became  a  part  of  the  telegraph,  which  is  a  part 
of  the  post  office,  which  is  a  part  of  the  govern- 
ment. It  is  a  fraction  of  a  fraction  of  a  fraction 
—  a  mere  twig  of  bureaucracy.  Under  such 
conditions  the  telephone  could  not  prosper.  The 
wonder  is  that  it  survived. 

Handled  on  the  American  plan,  the  telephone 
abroad  may  be  raised  to  American  levels.  There 
is  no  racial  reason  for  failure.  The  slow  service 
and  the  bungling  are  the  natural  results  of  treat- 
ing the  telephone  as  though  it  were  a  road  or  a 
fire  department;  and  any  nation  that  rises  to  a 
proper  conception  of  the  telephone,  that  dares  to 
put  it  into  competent  hands  and  to  strengthen 
it  with  enough  capital,  can  secure  as  alert  and 
brisk  a  service  as  heart  can  wish.  Some  nations 

[270] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

are  already  on  the  way.  China,  Japan,  and 
France  have  sent  delegations  to  New  York  City 
— "the  Mecca  of  telephone  men,"  to  learn  the 
art  of  telephony  in  its  highest  development. 
Even  Russia  has  rescued  the  telephone  from  her 
bureaucrats  and  is  now  offering  it  freely  to  men 
of  enterprise. 

In  most  foreign  countries  telephone  service  is 
being  steadily  geared  up  to  a  faster  pace.  The 
craze  for  "cheap  and  nasty"  telephony  is  passing; 
and  the  idea  that  the  telephone  is  above  all  else 
a  speed  instrument,  is  gaining  ground.  A  faster 
long-distance  service,  at  double  rates,  is  being 
well  patronized.  Slow-moving  races  are  learn- 
ing the  value  of  time,  which  is  the  first  lesson  in 
telephony.  Our  reapers  and  mowers  now  go  to 
seventy-five  nations.  Our  street  cars  run  in  all 
great  cities.  Morocco  is  importing  our  dollar 
watches ;  Korea  is  learning  the  waste  of  allowing 
nine  men  to  dig  with  one  spade.  And  all  this 
means  telephones. 

In  thirty  years,  the  Western  Electric  has  sold 
sixty-seven  million  dollars'  worth  of  telephonic 
apparatus  to  foreign  countries.  But  this  is  no 

[271] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

more  than  a  fair  beginning.  To  put  one  tele- 
phone in  China  to  every  hundred  people  will 
mean  an  outlay  of  three  hundred  million  dollars. 
To  give  Europe  as  fit  an  equipment  as  the 
United  States  now  has,  will  mean  thirty  million 
telephones,  with  proper  wire  and  switchboards 
to  match.  And  while  telephony  for  the  masses 
is  not  yet  a  live  question  in  many  countries, 
sooner  or  later,  in  the  relentless  push  of  civiliza- 
tion, it  must  come. 

Possibly,  in  that  far  future  of  peace  and  good- 
will among  nations,  when  each  country  does  for 
all  the  others  what  it  can  do  best,  the  United 
States  may  be  generally  recognized  as  the  source 
of  skill  and  authority  on  telephony.  It  may  be 
called  in  to  rebuild  or  operate  the  telephone 
systems  of  other  countries,  in  the  same  way  that 
it  is  now  supplying  oil  and  steel  rails  and 
farm  machinery.  Just  as  the  wise  buyer  of 
to-day  asks  France  for  champagne,  Germany 
for  toys,  England  for  cottons,  and  the  Orient 
for  rugs,  so  he  will  learn  to  look  upon  the  United 
States  as  the  natural  home  and  headquarters  of 
the  telephone. 

[272] 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  FUTURE   OF  THE   TELEPHONE 

TINT  the  Spring  of  1907  Theodore  N.  Vail,  a 
^  rugged,  ruddy,  white-haired  man,  was  super- 
intending the  building  of  a  big  barn  in  northern 
Vermont.  His  house  stood  near-by,  on  a  bal- 
cony of  rolling  land  that  overlooked  the  town  of 
Lyndon  and  far  beyond,  across  evergreen  forests 
to  the  massive  bulk  of  Burke  Mountain.  His 
farm,  very  nearly  ten  square  miles  in  area,  lay 
back  of  the  house  in  a  great  oval  of  field  and 
woodland,  with  several  dozen  cottages  in  the 
clearings.  His  Welsh  ponies  and  Swiss  cattle 
were  grazing  on  the  May  grass,  and  the  men 
were  busy  with  the  ploughs  and  harrows  and 
seeders.  It  was  almost  thirty  years  since  he 
had  been  called  in  to  create  the  business  struc- 
ture of  telephony,  and  to  shape  the  general  plan 
of  its  development.  Since  then  he  had  done 
many  other  things.  The  one  city  of  Buenos 

[273] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

Ayres  had  paid  him  more,  merely  for  giving  it  a 
system  of  trolleys  and  electric  lights,  than  the 
United  States  had  paid  him  for  putting  the  tele- 
phone on  a  business  basis.  He  was  now  rich 
and  retired,  free  to  enjoy  his  play-work  of  the 
farm  and  to  forget  the  troubles  of  the  city  and 
the  telephone. 

But,  as  he  stood  among  his  barn-builders,  there 
arrived  from  Boston  and  New  York  a  delegation 
of  telephone  directors.  Most  of  them  belonged 
to  the  "Old  Guard"  of  telephony.  They  had 
fought  under  Vail  in  the  pioneer  days ;  and  now 
they  had  come  to  ask  him  to  return  to  the  tele- 
phone business,  after  twenty  years  of  absence. 
Vail  laughed  at  the  suggestion. 

"Nonsense,"  he  said,  "I'm  too  old.  I'm  sixty- 
two  years  of  age."  The  directors  persisted. 
They  spoke  of  the  approaching  storm-cloud  of 
panic  and  the  need  of  another  strong  hand  at  the 
wheel  until  the  crisis  was  over,  but  Vail  still  re- 
fused. They  spoke  of  old  times  and  old  mem- 
ories, but  he  shook  his  head.  "All  my  life,"  he 
said,  "I  have  wanted  to  be  a  farmer." 

Then  they  drew  a  picture  of  the  telephone 

[274] 


THE     HISTORY     OP     THE     TELEPHONE 

situation.  They  showed  him  that  the  "grand 
telephonic  system"  which  he  had  planned  was 
unfinished.  He  was  its  architect,  and  it  was  un- 
done. The  telephone  business  was  energetic  and 
prosperous.  Under  the  brilliant  leadership  of 
Frederick  P.  Fish,  it  had  grown  by  leaps  and 
bounds.  But  it  was  still  far  from  being  the 
system  that  Vail  had  dreamed  of  in  his  younger 
days ;  and  so,  when  the  directors  put  before  him 
his  unfinished  plan,  he  surrendered.  The  in- 
stinct for  completeness,  which  is  one  of  the 
dominating  characteristics  of  his  mind,  com- 
pelled him  to  consent.  It  was  the  call  of  the 
telephone. 

Since  that  May  morning,  1907,  great  things 
have  been  done  by  the  men  of  the  telephone  and 
telegraph  world.  The  Bell  System  was  brought 
through  the  panic  without  a  scratch.  When  the 
doubt  and  confusion  were  at  their  worst,  Vail 
wrote  an  open  letter  to  his  stock-holders,  in  his 
practical,  farmer-like  way.  He  said: 

"Our  net  earnings  for  the  last  ten  months  were 
$13,715,000,  as  against  $11,579,000  for  the  same 
period  in  1906.  We  have  now  in  the  banks  over 

[275] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

$18,000,000;  and  we  will  not  need  to  borrow  any 
money  for  two  years." 

Soon  afterwards,  the  work  of  consolidation 
began.  Companies  that  overlapped  were  united. 
Small  local  wire-clusters,  several  thousands  of 
them,  were  linked  to  the  national  lines.  A  policy 
of  publicity  superseded  the  secrecy  which  had 
naturally  grown  to  be  a  habit  in  the  days  of 
patent  litigation.  Visitors  and  reporters  found 
an  open  door.  Educational  advertisements  were 
published  in  the  most  popular  magazines.  The 
corps  of  inventors  was  spurred  up  to  conquer 
the  long-distance  problems.  And  in  return  for 
a  thirty  million  check,  the  control  of  the  historic 
Western  Union  was  transferred  from  the 
children  of  Jay  Gould  to  the  thirty  thousand 
stock-holders  of  the  American  Telephone  and 
Telegraph  Company. 

From  what  has  been  done,  therefore,  we  may 
venture  a  guess  as  to  the  future  of  the  telephone. 
This  "grand  telephonic  system"  which  had  no 
existence  thirty  years  ago,  except  in  the  imagi- 
nation of  Vail,  seems  to  be  at  hand.  The  very 
newsboys  in  the  streets  are  crying  it.  And  while 

[276] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

there  is,  of  course,  no  exact  blueprint  of  a  best 
possible  telephone  system,  we  can  now  see  the 
general  outlines  of  Vail's  plan. 

There  is  nothing  mysterious  or  ominous  in  this 
plan.  It  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  pools  and 
conspiracies  of  Wall  Street.  No  one  will  be 
squeezed  out  except  the  promoters  of  paper 
companies.  The  simple  fact  is  that  Vail  is  or- 
ganizing a  complete  Bell  System  for  the  same 
reason  that  he  built  one  big  comfortable  barn  for 
his  Swiss  cattle  and  his  Welsh  ponies,  instead  of 
half  a  dozen  small  uncomfortable  sheds.  He  has 
never  been  a  "high  financier"  to  juggle  profits 
out  of  other  men's  losses.  He  is  merely  apply- 
ing to  the  telephone  business  the  same  hard  sense 
that  any  farmer  uses  in  the  management  of  his 
farm.  He  is  building  a  Big  Barn,  metaphoric- 
ally, for  the  telephone  and  telegraph. 

Plainly,  the  telephone  system  of  the  future 
will  be  national,  so  that  any  two  people  in  the 
same  country  will  be  able  to  talk  to  one  another. 
It  will  not  be  competitive,  for  the  reason  that  no 
farmer  would  think  for  a  moment  of  running  his 
farm  on  competitive  lines.  It  will  have  a  staff - 

[277] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

and-line  organization,  to  use  a  military  phrase. 
Each  local  company  will  continue  to  handle  its 
own  local  affairs,  and  exercise  to  the  full  the 
basic  virtue  of  self-help.  But  there  will  also  be, 
as  now,  a  central  body  of  experts  to  handle  the 
larger  affairs  that  are  common  to  all  companies. 
No  separateness  or  secession  on  the  one  side,  nor 
bureaucracy  on  the  other  —  that  is  the  typically 
American  idea  that  underlies  the  ideal  telephone 
system. 

The  line  of  authority,  in  such  a  system,  will 
begin  with  the  local  manager.  From  him  it  will 
rise  to  the  directors  of  the  State  company;  then 
higher  still  to  the  directors  of  the  national  com- 
pany; and  finally,  above  all  corporate  leaders  to 
the  Federal  Government  itself.  The  failure 
of  government  ownership  of  the  telephone  in  so 
many  foreign  countries  does  not  mean  that  the 
private  companies  will  have  absolute  power. 
Quite  the  reverse.  The  lesson  of  thirty  years' 
experience  shows  that  a  private  telephone  com- 
pany is  apt  to  be  much  more  obedient  to  the  will 
of  the  people  than  if  it  were  a  Government  de- 

[278] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

partment.  But  it  is  an  axiom  of  democracy  that 
no  company,  however  well  conducted,  will  be 
permitted  to  control  a  public  convenience  without 
being  held  strictly  responsible  for  its  own  acts. 
As  politics  becomes  less  of  a  game  and  more  of 
a  responsibility,  the  telephone  of  the  future  will 
doubtless  be  supervised  by  some  sort  of  public 
committee,  which  will  have  power  to  pass  upon 
complaints,  and  to  prevent  the  nuisance  of  dupli- 
cation and  the  swindle  of  watering  stock. 

As  this  Federal  supervision  becomes  more  and 
more  efficient,  the  present  fear  of  monopoly  will 
decrease,  just  as  it  did  in  the  case  of  the  railways. 
It  is  a  fact,  although  now  generally  forgotten, 
that  the  first  railways  of  the  United  States  were 
run  for  ten  years  or  more  on  an  anti-monopoly 
plan.  The  tracks  were  free  to  all.  Any  one 
who  owned  a  cart  with  flanged  wheels  could  drive 
it  on  the  rails  and  compete  with  the  locomotives. 
There  was  a  happy-go-lucky  jumble  of  trains 
and  wagons,  all  held  back  by  the  slowest  team; 
and  this  continued  on  some  railways  until  as  late 
as  1857.  By  that  time  the  people  saw  that  com- 

I  279  ] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

petition  on  a  railway  track  was  absurd.  They 
allowed  each  track  to  be  monopolized  by  one 
company,  and  the  era  of  expansion  began. 

No  one,  certainly,  at  the  present  time,  regrets 
the  passing  of  the  independent  teamster.  He 
was  much  more  arbitrary  and  expensive  than 
any  railroad  has  ever  dared  to  be;  and  as  the 
country  grew,  he  became  impossible.  He  was 
not  the  fittest  to  survive.  For  the  general  good, 
he  was  held  back  from  competing  with  the  rail- 
road, and  taught  to  cooperate  with  it  by  hauling 
freight  to  and  from  the  depots.  This,  to  his  sur- 
prise, he  found  much  more  profitable  and  pleas- 
ant. He  had  been  squeezed  out  of  a  bad  job 
into  a  good  one.  And  by  a  similar  process  of 
evolution,  the  United  States  is  rapidly  outgrow- 
ing the  small  independent  telephone  companies. 
These  will  eventually,  one  by  one,  rise  as  the 
teamster  did  to  a  higher  social  value,  by  clasping 
wires  with  the  main  system  of  telephony. 

Until  1881  the  Bell  System  was  in  the  hands 
of  a  family  group.  It  was  a  strictly  private 
enterprise.  The  public  had  been  asked  to  help 
in  its  launching,  and  had  refused.  But  after 

[  280  ] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

1881  it  passed  into  the  control  of  the  small 
stock-holders,  and  has  remained  there  without  a 
break.  It  is  now  one  of  our  most  democratized 
businesses,  scattering  either  wages  or  dividends 
into  more  than  a  hundred  thousand  homes. 
It  has  at  times  been  exclusive,  but  never  sordid. 
It  has  never  been  dollar-mad,  nor  frenzied  by  the 
virus  of  stock-gambling.  There  has  always  been 
a  vein  of  sentiment  in  it  that  kept  it  in  touch  with 
human  nature.  Even  at  the  present  time,  each 
check  of  the  American  Telephone  and  Telegraph 
Company  carries  on  it  a  picture  of  a  pretty 
Cupid,  sitting  on  a  chair  upon  which  he  has 
placed  a  thick  book,  and  gayly  prattling  into  a 
telephone. 

Several  sweeping  changes  may  be  expected  in 
the  near  future,  now  that  there  is  team-play 
between  the  Bell  System  and  the  Western  Union. 
Already,  by  a  stroke  of  the  pen,  five  million 
users  of  telephones  have  been  put  on  the  credit 
books  of  the  Western  Union ;  and  every  Bell  tele- 
phone office  is  now  a  telegraph  office.  Three 
telephone  messages  and  eight  telegrams  may  be 
sent  at  the  same  time  over  two  pairs  of  wires: 

[281] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

that  is  one  of  the  recent  miracles  of  science,  and 
is  now  to  be  tried  out  upon  a  gigantic  scale. 
Most  of  the  long-distance  telephone  wires,  fully 
two  million  miles,  can  be  used  for  telegraphic 
purposes;  and  a  third  of  the  Western  Union 
wires,  five  hundred  thousand  miles,  may  with  a 
few  changes  be  used  for  talking. 

The  Western  Union  is  paying  rent  for  twenty- 
two  thousand,  five  hundred  offices,  all  of  which 
helps  to  make  telegraphy  a  luxury  of  the  few. 
It  is  employing  as  large  a  force  of  messenger- 
boys  as  the  army  that  marched  with  General 
Sherman  from  Atlanta  to  the  sea.  Both  of 
these  items  of  expense  will  dwindle  when  a  Bell 
wire  and  a  Morse  wire  can  be  brought  to  a 
common  terminal;  and  when  a  telegram  can  be 
received  or  delivered  by  telephone.  There  will 
also  be  a  gain,  perhaps  the  largest  of  all,  in 
removing  the  trudging  little  messenger-boy  from 
the  streets  and  sending  him  either  to  school  or 
to  learn  some  useful  trade. 

The  fact  is  that  the  United  States  is  the  first 
country  that  has  succeeded  in  putting  both  tele- 
phone and  telegraph  upon  the  proper  basis. 

[282] 


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THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

Elsewhere  either  the  two  are  widely  apart,  or  the 
telephone  is  a  mere  adjunct  of  a  telegraphic  de- 
partment. According  to  the  new  American 
plan,  the  two  are  not  competitive,  but  comple- 
mentary. The  one  is  a  supplement  to  the  other. 
The  post  office  sends  a  package;  the  telegraph 
sends  the  contents  of  the  package;  but  the  tele- 
phone sends  nothing.  It  is  an  apparatus  that 
makes  conversation  possible  between  two  sepa- 
rated people.  Each  of  the  three  has  a  distinct 
field  of  its  own,  so  that  there  has  never  been  any 
cause  for  jealousy  among  them. 

To  make  the  telephone  an  annex  of  the  post 
office  or  the  telegraph  has  become  absurd. 
There  are  now  in  the  whole  world  very  nearly 
as  many  messages  sent  by  telephone  as  by  letter ; 
and  there  are  thirty-two  times  as  many  telephone 
calls  as  telegrams.  In  the  United  States,  the 
telephone  has  grown  to  be  the  big  brother  of  the 
telegraph.  It  has  six  times  the  net  earnings  and 
eight  times  the  wire.  And  it  transmits  as  many 
messages  as  the  combined  total  of  telegrams, 
letters,  and  railroad  passengers. 

This  universal  trend  toward  consolidation  has 

[283] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

introduced  a  variety  of  problems  that  will  engage 
the  ablest  brains  in  the  telephone  world  for  many 
years  to  come.  How  to  get  the  benefits  of  or- 
ganization without  its  losses,  to  become  strong 
without  losing  quickness,  to  become  systematic 
without  losing  the  dash  and  dare  of  earlier  days, 
to  develop  the  working  force  into  an  army  of 
high-speed  specialists  without  losing  the  bird's- 
eye  view  of  the  whole  situation, —  these  are  the 
riddles  of  the  new  type,  for  which  the  tele- 
phonists of  the  next  generation  must  find  the 
answers.  They  illustrate  the  nature  of  the  big 
jobs  that  the  telephone  has  to  offer  to  an  ambi- 
tious and  gifted  young  man  of  to-day. 

"The  problems  never  were  as  large  or  as  com- 
plex as  they  are  right  now,"  says  J.  J.  Carty,  the 
chief  of  the  telephone  engineers.  The  eternal 
struggle  remains  between  the  large  and  little 
ideas  —  between  the  men  who  see  what  might  be 
and  the  men  who  only  see  what  is.  There  is 
still  the  race  to  break  records.  Already  the  girl 
at  the  switchboard  can  find  the  person  wanted 
in  thirty  seconds.  This  is  one-tenth  of  the  time 

[284] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

that  was  taken  in  the  early  centrals;  but  it  is 
still  too  long.  It  is  one-half  of  a  valuable  min- 
ute. It  must  be  cut  to  twenty-five  seconds,  or 
twenty  or  fifteen. 

There  is  still  the  inventors'  battle  to  gain 
miles.  The  distance  over  which  conversations 
can  be  held  has  been  increased  from  twenty  miles 
to  twenty-five  hundred.  But  this  is  not  far 
enough.  There  are  some  civilized  human  beings 
who  are  twelve  thousand  miles  apart,  and  who 
have  interests  in  common.  During  the  Boxer 
Rebellion  in  China,  for  instance,  there  were 
Americans  in  Peking  who  would  gladly  have 
given  half  of  their  fortune  for  the  use  of  a  pair 
of  wires  to  New  York. 

In  the  earliest  days  of  the  telephone,  Bell  was 
fond  of  prophesying  that  "the  time  will  come 
when  we  will  talk  across  the  Atlantic  Ocean"; 
but  this  was  regarded  as  a  poetical  fancy  until 
Pupin  invented  his  method  of  automatically 
propelling  the  electric  current.  Since  then  the 
most  conservative  engineer  will  discuss  the  prob- 
lem of  transatlantic  telephony.  And  as  for  the 

[285] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

poets,  they  are  now  dreaming  of  the  time  when 
a  man  may  speak  and  hear  his  own  voice  come 
back  to  him  around  the  world. 

The  immediate  long-distance  problem  is,  of 
course,  to  talk  from  New  York  to  the  Pacific. 
The  two  oceans  are  now  only  three  and  a  half 
days  apart  by  rail.  Seattle  is  clamoring  for  a 
wire  to  the  East.  San  Diego  wants  one  in  time 
for  her  Panama  Canal  Exposition  in  1915. 
The  wires  are  already  strung  to  San  Francisco, 
but  cannot  be  used  in  the  present  stage  of  the  art. 
And  Vail's  captains  are  working  now  with  almost 
breathless  haste  to  give  him  a  birthday  present  of 
a  talk  across  the  continent  from  his  farm  in 
Vermont. 

"I  can  see  a  universal  system  of  telephony  for 
the  United  States  in  the  very  near  future,"  says 
Carty.  "There  is  a  statue  of  Seward  standing 
in  one  of  the  streets  of  Seattle.  The  inscription 
upon  it  is,  'To  a  United  Country/  But  as 
an  Easterner  stands  there,  he  feels  the  isolation 
of  that  Far  Western  State,  and  he  will  always 
feel  it,  until  he  can  talk  from  one  side  of  the 
United  States  to  the  other.  For  my  part,"  con- 

'[  286  ] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

tinues  Carty,  "I  believe  we  will  talk  across  con- 
tinents and  across  oceans.  Why  not?  Are 
there  not  more  cells  in  one  human  body  than  there 
are  people  in  the  whole  earth?" 

Some  future  Carty  may  solve  the  abandoned 
problem  of  the  single  wire,  and  cut  the  copper 
bill  in  two  by  restoring  the  grounded  circuit. 
He  may  transmit  vision  as  well  as  speech.  He 
may  perfect  a  third-rail  system  for  use  on 
moving  trains.  He  may  conceive  of  an  ideal  in- 
sulating material  to  supersede  glass,  mica,  paper, 
and  enamel.  He  may  establish  a  universal  code, 
so  that  all  persons  of  importance  in  the  United 
States  shall  have  call-numbers  by  which  they  may 
instantly  be  located,  as  books  are  in  a  library. 

Some  other  young  man  may  create  a  com- 
mercial department  on  wide  lines,  a  work  which 
telephone  men  have  as  yet  been  too  specialized  to 
do.  Whoever  does  this  will  be  a  man  of  com- 
prehensive brain.  He  will  be  as  closely  in  touch 
with  the  average  man  as  with  the  art  of  tele- 
phony. He  will  know  the  gossip  of  the  street, 
the  demands  of  the  labor  unions,  and  the 
policies  of  governors  and  presidents.  The  psy- 

[287] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

chology  of  the  Western  farmer  will  concern  him, 
and  the  tone  of  the  daily  press,  and  the  methods 
of  department  stores.  It  will  be  his  aim  to 
know  the  subtle  chemistry  of  public  opinion,  and 
to  adapt  the  telephone  service  to  the  shifting 
moods  and  necessities  of  the  times.  He  will  fit 
telephony  like  a  garment  around  the  habits  of  the 
people. 

Also,   now  that  the   telephone  business   has 
become  strong,  its  next  anxiety  must  be  to  de- 
velop the  virtues,  and  not  the  defects,  of  strength. 
Its  motto  must  be  fflch  &ien" —  I  serve ;  and  it 
will  be  the  work  of  the  future  statesmen  of  the 
telephone  to  illustrate  this  motto  in  all  its  prac- 
tical variations.     They  will  cater  and  explain, 
and  explain  and  cater.     They  will  educate  and 
educate,  until  they  have  created  an  expert  pub- 
lic.    They  will  teach  by  pictures  and  lectures 
and  exhibitions.     They  will  have  charts  and  dia- 
grams hung  in  the  telephone  booths,  so  that  the 
person  who  is  waiting  for  a  call  may  learn  a  little 
and  pass  the  time  more  pleasantly.     They  will, 
in  a  word,  attend  to  those  innumerable  trifles  that 
make  the  perfection  of  public  service. 

[288] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

Already  the  Bell  System  has  gone  far  in 
this  direction  by  organizing  what  might  fairly 
be  called  a  foresight  department.  Here  is 
where  the  fortune-tellers  of  the  business  sit. 
When  new  lines  or  exchanges  are  to  be  built, 
these  men  study  the  situation  with  an  eye  to 
the  future.  They  prepare  a  "fundamental 
plan,"  outlining  what  may  reasonably  be  ex- 
pected to  happen  in  fifteen  or  twenty  years. 
Invariably  they  are  optimists.  They  make  pro- 
vision for  growth,  but  none  at  all  for  shrinkage. 
By  their  advice,  there  is  now  twenty-five  mil- 
lion dollars'  worth  of  reserve  plant  in  the  va- 
rious Bell  Companies,  waiting  for  the  country 
to  grow  up  to  it.  Even  in  the  city  of  New 
York,  one-half  of  the  cable  ducts  are  empty, 
in  expectation  of  the  greater  city  of  eight  million 
population  which  is  scheduled  to  arrive  in  1928. 
There  are  perhaps  few  more  impressive  evidences 
of  practical  optimism  and  confidence  than  a  new 
telephone  exchange,  with  two-thirds  of  its  wires 
waiting  for  the  business  of  the  future. 

Eventually,  this  foresight  department  will 
expand.  It  may,  if  a  leader  of  genius  appear, 

[  289  ] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

become  the  first  real  corps  of  practical  sociolo- 
gists, which  will  substitute  facts  for  the  present 
hotch-potch  of  theories.  It  will  prepare  a  "fun- 
damental plan"  of  the  whole  United  States, 
showing  the  centre  of  each  industry  and  the 
main  runways  of  traffic.  It  will  act  upon  the 
basic  fact  that  wherever  there  is  interdependence, 
there  is  bound  to  be  telephony;  and  it  will  there- 
fore prepare  maps  of  interdependence,  showing 
the  widely  scattered  groups  of  industry  and 
finance,  and  the  lines  that  weave  them  into  a 
pattern  of  national  cooperation. 

As  yet,  no  nation,  not  even  our  own,  has  seen 
the  full  value  of  the  long-distance  telephone. 
Few  have  the  imagination  to  see  what  has  been 
made  possible,  and  to  realize  that  an  actual  face- 
to-face  conversation  may  take  place,  even  though 
there  be  a  thousand  miles  between.  Neither  can 
it  seem  credible  that  a  man  in  a  distant  city  may 
be  located  as  readily  as  though  he  were  close  at 
hand.  It  is  too  amazing  to  be  true,  and  possi- 
bly a  new  generation  will  have  to  arrive  before 
it  will  be  taken  for  granted  and  acted  upon 
freely.  Ultimately,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that 

'[290] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

long-distance  telephony  will  be  regarded  as  a 
national  asset  of  the  highest  value,  for  the  reason 
that  it  can  prevent  so  much  of  the  enormous 
economic  waste  of  travel. 

Nothing  that  science  can  say  will  ever  decrease 
the  marvel  of  a  long-distance  conversation,  and 
there  may  come  in  the  future  an  Interpreter 
who  will  put  it  before  our  eyes  in  the  form  of  a 
moving-picture.  He  will  enable  us  to  follow  the 
flying  words  in  a  talk  from  Boston  to  Denver. 
We  will  flash  first  to  Worcester,  cross  the  Hud- 
son on  the  high  bridge  at  Poughkeepsie,  swing 
southwest  through  a  dozen  coal  towns  to  the  out- 
skirts of  Philadelphia,  leap  across  the  Susque- 
hanna,  zigzag  up  and  down  the  Alleghenies  into 
the  murk  of  Pittsburg,  cross  the  Ohio  at  Wheel- 
ing, glance  past  Columbus  and  Indianapolis, 
over  the  Wabash  at  Terre  Haute,  into  St.  Louis 
by  the  Eads  bridge,  through  Kansas  City,  across 
the  Missouri,  along  the  corn-fields  of  Kansas, 
and  then  on  —  on  —  on  with  the  Sante  Fe 
Railway,  across  vast  plains  and  past  the  brink  of 
the  Grand  Canyon,  to  Pueblo  and  the  lofty  city 
of  Denver.  Twenty-five  hundred  miles  along 

[291] 


THE     HISTORY     OF     THE     TELEPHONE 

a  thousand  tons  of  copper  wire!  From  Bunker 
Hill  to  Pike's  Peak  in  a  second! 

Herbert  Spencer,  in  his  autobiography,  al- 
ludes to  the  impressive  fact  that  while  the  eye 
is  reading  a  single  line  of  type,  the  earth  has 
travelled  thirty  miles  through  space.  But  this, 
in  telephony,  would  be  slow  travelling.  It  is 
simple  everyday  truth  to  say  that  while  your  eye 
is  reading  this  dash, — ,  a  telephone  sound  can  be 
carried  from  New  York  to  Chicago. 

There  are  many  reasons  to  believe  that  for  the 
practical  idealists  of  the  future,  the  supreme 
study  will  be  the  force  that  makes  such  miracles 
possible.  Six  thousand  million  dollars  —  one- 
twentieth  of  our  national  wealth  —  is  at  the  pres- 
ent time  invested  in  electrical  development.  The 
Electrical  Age  has  not  yet  arrived;  but  it  is  at 
hand ;  and  no  one  can  tell  how  brilliant  the  result 
may  be,  when  the  creative  minds  of  a  nation  are 
focussed  upon  the  subdual  of  this  mysterious 
force,  which  has  more  power  and  more  delicacy 
than  any  other  force  that  man  has  been  able  to 
harness. 

As  a  tame  and  tractable  energy,  Electricity  is 

[292] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

new.  It  has  no  past  and  no  pedigree.  It  is 
younger  than  many  people  who  are  now  alive. 
Among  the  wise  men  of  Greece  and  Rome,  few 
knew  its  existence,  and  none  put  it  to  any  prac- 
tical use.  The  wisest  knew  that  a  piece  of 
amber,  when  rubbed,  will  attract  feathery  sub- 
stances. But  they  regarded  this  as  poetry  rather 
than  science.  There  was  a  pretty  legend  among 
the  Phoenicians  that  the  pieces  of  amber  were  the 
petrified  tears  of  maidens  who  had  thrown  them- 
selves into  the  sea  because  of  unrequited  love, 
and  each  bead  of  amber  was  highly  prized.  It 
was  worn  as  an  amulet  and  a  symbol  of  purity. 
Not  for  two  thousand  years  did  any  one  dream 
that  within  its  golden  heart  lay  hidden  the  secret 
of  a  new  electrical  civilization. 

Not  even  in  1752,  when  Benjamin  Franklin 
flew  his  famous  kite  on  the  banks  of  the  Schuyl- 
kill  River,  and  captured  the  first  canned  light- 
ning, was  there  any  definite  knowledge  of  elec- 
trical energy.  His  lightning-rod  was  regarded 
as  an  insult  to  the  deity  of  Heaven.  It  was 
blamed  for  the  earthquake  of  1755.  And  not 
until  the  telegraph  of  Morse  came  into  general 

[293  ] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

use,  did  men  dare  to  think  of  the  thunder-bolt  of 
Jove  as  a  possible  servant  of  the  human  race. 

Thus  it  happened  that  when  Bell  invented  the 
telephone,  he  surprised  the  world  with  a  new 
idea.  He  had  to  make  the  thought  as  well  as 
the  thing.  No  Jules  Verne  or  H.  G.  Wells  had 
foreseen  it.  The  author  of  the  Arabian  Nights 
fantasies  had  conceived  of  a  flying  carpet,  but 
neither  he  nor  any  one  else  had  conceived  of 
flying  conversation.  In  all  the  literature  of 
ancient  days,  there  is  not  a  line  that  will  apply 
to  the  telephone,  except  possibly  that  expressive 
phrase  in  the  Bible,  "And  there  came  a  voice." 
In  these  more  privileged  days,  the  telephone  has 
come  to  be  regarded  as  a  commonplace  fact  of 
everyday  life;  and  we  are  apt  to  forget  that  the 
wonder  of  it  has  become  greater  and  not  less; 
and  that  there  are  still  honor  and  profit,  plenty 
of  both,  to  be  won  by  the  inventor  and  the 
scientist. 

The  flood  of  electrical  patents  was  never  higher 
than  now.  There  are  literally  more  in  a  single 
month  than  the  total  number  issued  by  the  Patent 
Office  up  to  1859.  The  Bell  System  has  three 

[294] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

hundred  experts  who  are  paid  to  do  nothing  else 
but  try  out  all  new  ideas  and  inventions;  and 
before  these  words  can  pass  into  the  printed 
book,  new  uses  and  new  methods  will  have 
been  discovered.  There  is  therefore  no  imme- 
diate danger  that  the  art  of  telephony  will  be 
less  fascinating  in  the  future  than  it  has  been  in 
the  past.  It  will  still  be  the  most  alluring  and 
elusive  sprite  that  ever  led  the  way  through  a 
Dark  Continent  of  mysterious  phenomena. 

There  still  remains  for  some  future  scientist 
the  task  of  showing  us  in  detail  exactly  what  the 
telephone  current  does.  Such  a  man  will  study 
vibrations  as  Darwin  studied  the  differentiation 
of  species.  He  will  investigate  how  a  child's 
voice,  speaking  from  Boston  to  Omaha,  can 
vibrate  more  than  a  million  pounds  of  copper 
wire ;  and  he  will  invent  a  finer  system  of  time  to 
fit  the  telephone,  which  can  do  as  many  different 
things  in  a  second  as  a  man  can  do  in  a  day,  trans- 
mitting with  every  tick  of  the  clock  from  twenty- 
five  to  eighty  thousand  vibrations.  He  will  deal 
with  the  various  vibrations  of  nerves  and  wires 
and  wireless  air,  that  are  necessary  in  conveying 

[295] 


THE      HISTORY      OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

thought  between  two  separated  minds.  He  will 
make  clear  how  a  thought,  originating  in  the 
brain,  passes  along  the  nerve-wires  to  the  vocal 
chords,  and  then  in  wireless  vibration  of  air  to 
the  disc  of  the  transmitter.  At  the  other  end 
of  the  line  the  second  disc  re-creates  these  vibra- 
tions, which  impinge  upon  the  nerve-wires  of  an 
ear,  and  are  thus  carried  to  the  consciousness  of 
another  brain. 

And  so,  notwithstanding  all  that  has  been  done 
since  Bell  opened  up  the  way,  the  telephone  re- 
mains the  acme  of  electrical  marvels.  No  other 
thing  does  so  much  with  so  little  energy.  No 
other  thing  is  more  enswathed  in  the  unknown. 
Not  even  the  gray-haired  pioneers  who  have  lived 
with  the  telephone  since  its  birth,  can  understand 
their  protege.  As  to  the  why  and  the  how,  there 
is  as  yet  no  answer.  It  is  as  true  of  telephony 
to-day  as  it  was  in  1876,  that  a  child  can  use 
what  the  wisest  sages  cannot  comprehend. 

Here  is  a  tiny  disc  of  sheet-iron.  I  speak  —  it 
shudders.  It  has  a  different  shudder  for  every 
sound.  It  has  thousands  of  millions  of  different 
shudders.  There  is  a  second  disc  many  miles 

[296] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

away,  perhaps  twenty-five  hundred  miles  away. 
Between  the  two  discs  runs  a  copper  wire.  As 
I  speak,  a  thrill  of  electricity  flits  along  the  wire. 
This  thrill  is  moulded  by  the  shudder  of  the  disc. 
It  makes  the  second  disc  shudder.  And  the 
shudder  of  the  second  disc  reproduces  my  voice. 
That  is  what  happens.  But  how  —  not  all  the 
scientists  of  the  world  can  tell. 

The  telephone  current  is  a  phenomenon  of  the 
ether,  say  the  theorists.  But  what  is  ether?  No 
one  knows.  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  has  guessed  that 
it  is  "perhaps  the  only  substantial  thing  in  the 
material  universe";  but  no  one  knows.  There 
is  nothing  to  guide  us  in  that  unknown  country 
except  a  sign-post  that  points  upwards  and  bears 
the  one  word  — "Perhaps."  The  ether  of  space! 
Here  is  an  Eldorado  for  the  scientists  of  the 
future,  and  whoever  can  first  map  it  out  will  go 
far  toward  discovering  the  secret  of  telephony. 

Some  day  —  who  knows?  —  there  may  come 
the  poetry  and  grand  opera  of  the  telephone. 
Artists  may  come  who  will  portray  the  marvel 
of  the  wires  that  quiver  with  electrified  words, 
and  the  romance  of  the  switchboards  that  trem- 

[  297  ] 


THE      HISTORY     OF     THE      TELEPHONE 

ble  with  the  secrets  of  a  great  city.  Already 
Puvis  de  Chavannes,  by  one  of  his  superb  panels 
in  the  Boston  Library,  has  admitted  the  tele- 
phone and  the  telegraph  to  the  world  of  art. 
He  has  embodied  them  as  two  flying  figures, 
poised  above  the  electric  wires,  and  with  the 
following  inscription  underneath:  "By  the  won- 
drous agency  of  electricity,  speech  flashes 
through  space  and  swift  as  lightning  bears  tid- 
ings of  good  and  evil" 

But  these  random  guesses  as  to  the  future  of 
the  telephone  may  fall  far  short  of  what  the 
reality  will  be.  In  these  dazzling  days  it  is  idle 
to  predict.  The  inventor  has  everywhere  put 
the  prophet  out  of  business.  Fact  has  outrun 
Fancy.  When  Morse,  for  instance,  was  tacking 
up  his  first  little  line  of  wire  around  the  Speed- 
well Iron  Works,  who  could  have  foreseen  two 
hundred  and  fifty  thousand  miles  of  submarine 
cables,  by  which  the  very  oceans  are  all  aquiver 
with  the  news  of  the  world?  When  Fulton's 
tiny  tea-kettle  of  a  boat  steamed  up  the  Hudson 
to  Albany  in  two  days,  who  could  have  foreseen 
the  steel  leviathans,  one-sixth  of  a  mile  in  length, 

I  298] 


THE      HISTORY     OF      THE      TELEPHONE 

that  can  in  the  same  time  cut  the  Atlantic  Ocean 
in  halves?  And  when  Bell  stood  in  a  dingy 
workshop  in  Boston  and  heard  the  clang  of  a 
clock-spring  come  over  an  electric  wire,  who 
could  have  foreseen  the  massive  structure  of  the 
Bell  System,  built  up  by  half  the  telephones  of 
the  world,  and  by  the  investment  of  more  actual 
capital  than  has  gone  to  the  making  of  any  other 
industrial  association?  Who  could  have  fore- 
seen what  the  telephone  bells  have  done  to  ring 
out  the  old  ways  and  to  ring  in  the  new;  to  ring 
out  delay  and  isolation  and  to  ring  in  the  effi- 
ciency and  the  friendliness  of  a  truly  united 
people? 


THE  END 


[299] 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Abyssinia,  telephone  in,  267 
Ade,  George,  quoted,  258 
Adee,  A.  A.,  quoted,  122 
Advertisement       for       tele- 
phone, first,  52,  53 
Africa,  telephone  in,  266 
Alexander  the  Great,  speak- 
ing-trumpet of,  220 
Algeria,  telephone  in,  266 
Altoona,    Pa.,    use    of    tele- 
phone in,  208,  243 
Amber,     myth     concerning, 

293 

American  Bell  Telephone 
Company,  organization 
of,  85 

American        Speaking-Tele- 
phone   Company,    organi- 
zation of,  59 
American    spirit,    telephone 

fosters,  235 

American  Telephone  and 
Telegraph  Company,  173, 
174,  276,  281 

Apple  crop  saved  by  tele- 
phone, 217 

Art,  telephone  and  telegraph 
in,  298 


Asia,  telephone  in,  263-265 
Athenaeum,  London,  editorial 

opinion  of  telephone,  245 
Atlantic   Cable,  40,  43,  57, 

222 
Attleborough,     Mass.,     test 

with    underground    wires 

at,  129 

Australia,  telephone  in,  266 
Austro-Hungary,     telephone 

in,  260 
Automatic  switchboard,  149, 

193 


Bag  system  in  postal  cars 
introduced  by  Theodore 
N.  Vail,  65 

Balch,  George  W.,  of  De- 
troit, obtained  Michigan 
State  agency  for  tele- 
phone, 54,  55 

Baltimore,  use  of  telephone 
in  emergency  in,  213,  214 

Bankers  slow  to  adopt  tele- 
phone, 203 

Barrett,    John   A.,    131-133 

Barton,  Enos  M.,  92,  145, 
163-165,  247 


[  303  ] 


INDEX 


Belgium,  telephone  in,  262, 
269 

Bell,  Alexander  Graham, 
13-16,  18-23,  28-30,  33- 
36,  42,  4-3,  46,  49,  51,  55, 
57,  58,  61,  63,  74,  75,  86, 
87,  91,  150,  198,  221, 
246,  248-250 

Bell  Companies  (also  Bell 
System),  66,  75,  76,  82- 
90,  96,  100,  101,  105, 
119,  141,  156,  160,  164, 
171-174,  181-183,  189, 
190,  193-198,  234,  241, 
269,  275-278,  280,  281, 
289,  294,  299 

Bell  Telephone  Association, 
organization  of,  55 

Bell  Telephone  Company, 
organization  of,  66 

Berliner,  Emile,  118,  119 

Bethell,  Union  N.,  180,  189, 
241 

Bismarck  and  telephone, 
256 

Blake,  Dr.  Clarence  J.,  26, 
106 

Blake,  Francis,  inventor  of 
transmitter,  75,  120 

Boston  Advertiser,  The, 
quoted  concerning  tele- 
phone, 49 

Boston  Globe,  The,  and 
telephone,  50,  210 


Boston-New  York  line,  172, 
173 

Boston,  rates  in,  70 

Boston  Times,  The,  editorial 
comment  on  telephone, 
45 

Boys  as  telephone  operators, 
152-155 

Bridging  bell,  148 

British  South  Africa,  tele- 
phone in,  266 

Brooklyn,  use  of  telephone 
in  emergency  in,  212 

Brownsville,  Russian  Jew 
community,  telephones  in, 
236 

Buffalo,  cost  of  telephone 
system  to,  241 

Bulgaria,  telephone  in,  262 

Burglar-alarms  and  tele- 
phone, 53,  54,  151 


Cablegram,  time  record  of, 
237 

Cables,  telephone,  133,   162 

Caithness,  Earl  of,  and  tele- 
phone, 251 

Canada,  telephone  in,  266, 
268 

Carty,  J.  J.,  123-126,  138, 
148,  166,  172,  284,  286, 
287 


304] 


INDEX 


Cedergren,  Henry,  of  Swed- 
en's telephone  system, 
263 

Centennial  Exposition,  Phil- 
adelphia, 1876,  telephone 
exhibited  at,  35-41,  51, 
104,  248 

Chavannes,  Puvis  de,  em- 
bodied telephone  and  tele- 
graph in  painting,  298 

Cheapness  of  telephone 
service,  238-240 

Chicago-built  switchboard 
for  Paris,  259 

Chicago  telephone  exchange 
in  1879,  153 

Chicago  telephone  service, 
185 

Childs,  William  A.,  150 

China,    telephone     in,     264, 

265,  272 

City  life,  effect  of  tele- 
phone upon,  199 

Cleveland,  President,  not 
user  of  telephone,  202 

Colorado,  telephone  used  in, 
to  save  crop,  217 

Common  battery  system, 
178 

Competing  and  independent 
telephone  companies,  see 
under  Telephone 

Congo  region,  telephone  in, 

266,  267 


Connecticut,  telephones  in, 
216 

Cornish,  Thomas  E.,  71 

Corporations,  use  of  tele- 
phone by,  206,  207 

Costliest  telephone  line,  215 

Crerar,  John,  185 

Current,  telephone,  34,  114, 
115,  130,  139,  297 

Cutler,  Charles  F.,  188,  189 

D 

Dalrymple,  Oliver,  of  North 

Dakota,  216 

David,  Thomas  B.  A.,  150 
Davis,  J.  P.,  129 
Deaf-mutes     instructed     by 

Alexander    Graham    Bell, 

20-23,  38,  86 
Denver,    cost    of    telephone 

system  to,  241 
Discs,  iron,  use  of,  27,  32, 

44,  109,  HO,  296,  297 
Dividends,     first     paid     by 

telephone,  85 
Dolbear,  Prof.  Amos  E.,  59, 

60,  79,  81,  93,  95 
Doolittle,  Thomas  B.,  maker 

of   first   hard-drawn   cop- 
per wire,  136 
Doolittle,     Thomas     B.,    of 

Bridgeport,  150 
Drawbaugh  case,  97 
Drawbaugh,  Daniel,  97,  98 


[  305  ] 


INDEX 


Dutch  East  Indies,  tele- 
phone in,  264 

E 

Ear,  human,  its  part  in  in- 
vention of  telephone,  26, 
27 

Edison,  Thomas  A.,  59,  60, 
69,  79,  81,  95,  119 

Edison  transmitter,   69,   75, 

119 

Editors,  British,  their  opin- 
ions of  telephone,  247, 
250 

Egypt,  telephone  in,  266 
Electrical  development,  292- 

297 

Electrical    engineering,    114 
Electrical  patents,  103,  294 
Electricity,     Bell's     knowl- 
edge of,  30,  32,  34 
Ellis,  Alexander  J.,  16,  17 
Emergencies,    use    of    tele- 
phone  in,   211-214,    216, 
217,  243 

Emerson,  quoted,  230 
Emery,  — ,   first  telephones 

leased  by,  52 
England,   telephone   in,   74, 

246-255,  268 

Etiquette  of  telephone,   159 
Europe,  telephone  in,  245- 

249,  251-263,  268-272 
Exchanges,      54,      149-155, 
186,  187,  204,  241 


Farmers,  use  of  telephones 
by,  215-219 

Farmhouses,  number  of  tele- 
phones in,  215 

Federal  service,  telephones 
used  by,  20  f 

Field  &  Co.,  Marshall,  tele- 
phone orders,  200 

Fiji    Islands,   telephone    in, 

267 

Financial  world,  use  of  tele- 
phone in,  204,  205 

Finland,   telephone    in,   269 

Firman,  L.  B.,  146 

Fish,  Frederick  P.,  181,  195, 
275 

Flat  rate  system,   178,  257 

Folsom,  N.  M.,  use  of  tele- 
phone in  emergency  in, 
212 

Forbes,  Col.  William  H., 
61,  76 

Foreign  trade  in  and  use  of 
telephone,  245-272 

France,  telephone  in,  257- 
259 

Fruit  crop  saved  by  tele- 
phone, 217 

G 

Garfield,   first    President   to 

install  telephone,  202 
General    Slocum,    news     of 


[306] 


INDEX 


burning  of,  reported  by 
telephone,  212 

Germany,  telephone  in,  255, 
256,  268 

Gifford,  George,  82 

Gilliland,  E.  T.,  112 

Girl  telephone  operators, 
154-159,  257 

Glasgow,  telephone  in,  254 

Glidden,  Charles  J.,  171 

Gould,  Jay,  88 

Government  ownership  of 
telephone,  278,  279;  see 
also  Foreign  trade  in  and 
use  of  telephone 

Government  service,  tele- 
phone in,  201 

"  Governors'  Company," 
172 

Gower,  Frederick  A.,  245 

Granger  movement  in  Mid- 
dle West,  90 

Gray,  Elisha,  59,  60,  79, 
81,  82,  90-93,  164 

Great  Britain,  post  office  in, 
221 

Great  Britain,  telephone  in, 
see  England,  telephone 
in 

Great  Western,  ocean  record 
of,  221 

Greece,  telephone  in,  262 

Grounded  circuit,   121,  287 


H 

Hale,  E.  J.  M.,  of  Haver^ 

hill,  74 

Hall,  Edward  J.,  179,  180 
Hall,  E.  J.,  153 
"Harriman,  E.  H.,  as  user  of 

telephone,  205,  206 
Harrison,      President,      not 

user  of  telephone,   202 
Helmholtz,   his   experiments 

to       determine       physical 

basis    of    music,    16,    17, 

106 
Henry,    Prof.    Joseph,    29- 

31,39,40,95,  106,  119 
Hill,  Edward  J.,  173 
Holland,   telephone   in,   262 
Holmes,  E.  T.,  53,  54,  151 
Hubbard,   Gardiner  G.,   24, 

28,  31,  35,  36,  46-48,  52, 

53,  55,  57,  61,  63,  65,  70, 

73,  85,  86,  246 
Hubbard,  Mabel,  Alexander 

Graham  Bell's  pupil  and 

later  his  wife,  23,  28,  86 
Hudson,      John      Elbridge, 

176,  177,  181,  195 
Hudson  Terminal  Building, 

New     York,    comparative 

number  of  telephones  in, 

187 
Hudson  Terminal  Building, 

New       York,       telephone 

cable  in,   135 


[307] 


INDEX 


Hughes,  David  E.,  119 
Runnings,  Rev.  Henry,  120 


Iceland,  telephone  in,  262 
Illinois,   telephones   in,   216 
Independent  companies,  see 

under  Telephone 
India,  telephone  in,  264 
Indiana,  telephones  in,  216 


Induction, 


mysterious 


noises  "  due  to,  122 
Inspection     of    product    of 

Western      Electric,      162, 

163 

Insulation,  138 
Inter-city  line,  first,  171 
International    and    Oriental 

Telephone  Company,  247 
Iowa,  telephones  in,  216 
Italy,    telephones    in,    261, 

262 


Jacobs,  — ,   English   inven- 
tor, 138 

Japan,  telephone  in,  264 
Japanese,   use   of   telephone 
by,  in  war,  214,  215 


Kansas    City,    use    of    tele- 
phone   in    emergency    in, 


213 


Kelvin,  Lord,  39-41,  95, 
248,  249,  252 

Kempelin,  Baron  de,  talk- 
ing-machine made  by,  18 

Kendall,  Amos,  66 

Kessler,  George,  quoted,  258 

"  Kickers'  League,"  258 

Koenig,   106 


Lectures  delivered  by  Alex- 
ander Graham  Bell,  49, 
51,  52 

Lincoln,  Robert  T.,  185 

Lockwood,  Thomas  D.,  102- 
104 

Lodge,  Sir  Oliver,  quoted, 
297 

London  Times,  The,  and 
telephone,  43,  250 

Long-distance  line,  first  in 
Europe,  257 

Long-distance  lines  and 
messages,  172,  183,  184, 
206,  207,  237,  240,  282, 
285-287,  290,  291 

Louisiana,  telephones  in, 
216 

Lowell,  Judge,  quoted,  96 

M 

Mail  service,  early  English 
and  American,  221 

Margherita,  Queen  Dow- 
ager, and  telephone,  261 


[  308  ] 


INDEX 


Mason  and  Dixon's  Line, 
number  of  Bell  wires 
crossing,  235 

Maynard,  George  C.,  of 
Washington,  quoted,  93 

McKinley,  President,  as 
user  of  telephone,  202 

Membrane  in  telephone,  in- 
ception of  idea  of,  27 

Mental  habits  influenced  by 
telephone,  231,  232 

Message  rate  system,  180, 
181,  257 

Messina,  aid  for,  summoned 
by  telephone,  213 

Metallic  circuit,  122,  172 

Mexico,  telephone  in,  266 

Michigan  State  agency  for 
telephone,  54 

Mississippi  River,  number 
of  Bell  wires  crossing, 
234 

Monte  Rosa  telephone,  high- 
est in  world,  26 1 

Morse,  inventor  of  tele- 
graph, 31,  32,  64,  78,  298 

Mukden,  battle  of,  use  of 
telephone  at,  214 

Multimillionaires,  none 

created  by  telephone,  87 

Musical  telegraph,  17,  24, 
25,  31,  78,  91 

"  Mysterious  noises,"  120- 
122 


N 

National  Bell  Telephone 
Company,  organization 
of,  76 

National  Telephone  Conven- 
tion, Niagara  Falls,  1880, 
70 

Nationalities  in  public 
schools,  235 

Nationalities,  various,  in 
America,  telephone  used 
by,  235,  236 

Nebraska,  telephones  in,  216 

News-gathering  by  tele- 
phone, 50,  51,  210,  211 

New  York-Boston  line,  172, 
173 

New  York  Herald,  The, 
quoted  concerning  tele- 
phone, 45 

New  York  telephone  sys- 
tem, 130,  141,  152,  179, 
185-189,  199,  200,  204, 
208,  212,  236,  238,  239, 
289 

New  York  World,  The,  and 
telephone,  210,  211 

New  Zealand,  telephone  in, 
266 

Nobility,  English,  telephone 
adopted  by,  251 

O 

O'Connell,  Joseph,  148 
Operators,  boys,   152—155 


309] 


INDEX 


Operators,  girls,  154-159, 
257 

Orton,  President,  of  West- 
ern Union  Telegraph 
Company,  refused  to  buy 
telephone  patents,  58,  59 

Overland   Company,   98,   99 

Oyama,  Gen.,  use  of  tele- 
phone by,  215 


Paris,  telephone  system  of, 

257-259 
Party  line,  148 
Patent   Office's  investigation 

of  telephone  patents,  100, 

101 

Patents     and     lawsuits     in- 
volving telephone,  33,  58, 

67,   77-85,   88-105,    109, 

119,  144,  160 
Pedro,    Emperor    Dom,    of 

Brazil,  38,  39,  266 
Pennsylvania    Railway,    use 

of  telephone  by,  208,  243 
Perkins,  George  W.,  as  user 

of  telephone,  204 
Persia,  telephone  in,  265 
"  Phantom  circuit,"  138 
Philadelphia,       first       "  dry 

core "   cable  laid  in,   132 
Philadelphia,       introduction 

of  telephone  into,  70,  71 
PickernelL,  F.  A.,  132 


Poles,  telegraph  and  tele- 
phone, 134 

Pope,  Frank  L.,  80,  81 

Population,  whether  concen- 
trated or  scattered  by 
telephone,  200 

Porter,  H.  H.,  185 

Portugal,  telephone  in,  262 

Postage  stamps  introduced, 
221 

Printing-telegraph,  see  Tele- 
graph, printing- 

Providence  Press,  The,  and 
telephone,  45 

Pupin  coil,  138,  139,  169, 
285 

Pupin,  Michael  J.,  138,  139 

Q 

Quebec  Tercentenary,  1908, 
use  of  telephone  at,  201 


Railways,  early,  on  anti- 
monopoly  plan,  279,  280 

Railways,  use  of  telephone 
by,  208,  209,  243 

Rates,  telephone,  70,  178- 
181,  192,  242-244,  257 

Reaper,  McCormick's,  how 
received,  43 

Receiver,  telephone,  as  in- 
vented by  Bell,  115,  116 

Reis,  Philip,  German  expe- 
rimenter, 94 


INDEX 


"Reis   telephone/'   94-96 

Reis  transmitter,  95 

Reynolds,  William  H.,  246 

Rocky  Mountain  Bell  Com- 
pany, 184,  185 

Rooke,  Mrs.  S.  J.,  heroic 
operator,  213 

"  Room  Nine,"  New  York, 
184 

Roosevelt,  ex-President,  as 
user  of  telephone,  203 

Roumania,  telephone  in,  262 

Russia,  telephone  in,  260, 
271 

Russo-Japanese  War,  use  of 
telephone  in,  214,  215 


S 

Sailing  vessel,  efficiency  of, 
221 

St.  Bernard  monks  use  tele- 
phone to  rescue  travellers, 
261 

St.  Louis,  rates  in,  70 

Sanders  family,  Salem,  22, 
23,  49,  85 

Sanders,  Georgie,  deaf- 
mute,  Bell's  pupil,  22,  28 

Sanders,  Thomas,  23,  28,  31, 
35,  55-57,  60,  61,  63,  72, 
74,  76,  85 

San  Francisco  Chinese,  use 
of  telephone  by,  265 


San  Francisco  sufferers,  aid 
for,  summoned  by  tele- 
phone, 213 

Saturday  Review's  comment 
on  telephone,  247 

Scott,  Leon,  106 

Scott,  Col.  Thomas,  of  Phil- 
adelphia, 71 

Scribner,  Charles  E.,  144- 
147 

Servia,  telephone  in,  262 

Sewing-machine,  Howe's, 
how  received,  43 

Signals,  148 

Skyscrapers,  telephones  and 
wires  in,  134,  135,  200 

Smith,  Chauncy,  lawyer  for 
Bell  System,  101,  103 

South  America,  telephone  in, 
266 

Spain,  telephone  in,  262 

Speaking-trumpet  of  Alex- 
ander the  Great,  220 

Speed  instinct  in  United 
States,  232-234 

Spencer,  Herbert,  quoted, 
248,  292 

Stager,  Gen.  Anson,  185 

Standard  Oil  Company  as 
user  of  telephone,  207 

Stephen,  Judge,  his  decision 
in  regard  to  telephone, 
253 

Stillman,  James,  203 

Stockholm,   best    telephoned 


[311] 


INDEX 


city  outside  United  States, 

263 
Storrow,    James    J.,   lawyer 

for  Bell  System,  101-103 
Sweden,   telephone   in,   263, 

266,  268 
Switchboard,  112,  113,  141- 

149,  259 
Switchboard,  automatic,  149, 

193 
Switzerland,    telephone     in, 

260 


Taft,  President,  as  user  of 

telephone,  203 
Talking-machine     made    by 

Baron  de  Kempelin,  18 
Taller,    London,    and    tele- 
phone, 250 
Telegraph,    compared    with 

telephone,  52,  53,  283 
Telegraph,  in  art,  298 
Telegraph,  invention  of,  64 
Telegraph,  Morse's,  how  re- 
ceived, 43 
Telegraph,  printing-,  37,  59, 

71,  248 
Telephone  — 

invention  of,  11-16,  18, 
22-28,  30-35,  41,  77, 
78,  81,  87,  91,  92,  95, 
100,  104-107,  115,  119, 
165,  222,  228,  229,  249, 
294,  299 


patents  for,  and  suits 
over,  33,  58,  67,  77-85, 
88-105,  109,  119,  144, 
160 

confused  with  telegraph, 
33,  34,  252,  253,  270 

at  Centennial  Exposition, 
35-41,  51,  104,  248 

how  received  by  public, 
42-61,  76,  77,  108,  178 

first  sustained  conversa- 
tion over,  49 

used  by  newspapers,  49- 
51,  210,  211 

first  money  paid   for,   52 

first  advertisement  for,  52, 
53 

financing  of  (experiments, 
development,  etc.),  28, 
29,  35,  55-58,  60,  6l, 
66,  72-76,  85,  174,  177, 
181,  182,  280,  281 

conflict  with  Western 
Union,  58-61,  66-71, 
75,  76,  79-85,  88,  89 

inventor  and  backers  of, 
63,  85,  86,  195 

organization  of  business 
of,  62,  63,  65-69,  73, 
75,  76,  85 

apparatus  of,  68,  75,  76, 
109-112,  117-120,  160, 
271,  272;  see  also 
Western  Electric 

number   in   use,   68,    180, 


[312] 


INDEX 


Telephone  —  continued 

183,  185,  186,215,234, 
267,  268 

rates  for  use  of,  70,  76, 
178-181,239,240,242- 
244 

in  foreign  countries,  74, 
186,  187,  245-272,  278 

first  dividends  paid  by,  85 

competing  and  independ- 
ent companies,  88-101, 
189-194,  218,  280 

development  of  business 
of,  engineering,  etc., 
108,  110-118,  125,  126, 
139-141,  166,  168,  169, 
178,  236 

switchboard,  112,  113, 
141-149,  259 

electrical  current  of,  34, 
114,  115,  130,  139,  297 

number  pieces  composing 
desk  set,  120 

"  mysterious  noises  "  on, 
and  grounded  and  me- 
tallic circuits,  120-123, 
287 

wires,  cables,-  and  poles 
of,  126-138,  162,  182, 
196,  197,  267,  289 

wire  chiefs  of,  139,  140 

repairs  and  improve- 
ments, 140,  141 

exchanges,  54,  149-155, 
186,  187,  204,  241 


operators,  153-159,  187 

countries  which  contribute 
to  make  a  message  pos- 
sible, 162 

Enos  M.  Barton  quoted 
concerning,  164 

language  of,   167 

experts'  knowledge  of, 
167 

expansion  of  business  of, 
170,  173-175,  177,  178, 
181-183,  185,  190,  275 

long-distance  lines  and 
messages,  171-173,  183, 
184,237,282,285-287, 
290-292 

users  of,  180 

statistics  of,  182,  196, 
197,  267,  275 

its  place  in  modern  life, 
199-220,  230-240,  243 

Presidents  make  use  of, 
202,  203 

use  in  financial  world, 
204,  205 

use  by  railways,  208,  209, 
243 

emergency  use  of,  211— 
214,  216,  217,  243 

use  of,  in  war,  214,  215 

use  of,  in  farming  com- 
munities, 215-219 

crop  saved  by  means  of, 
217,  218 


[313] 


INDEX 


Telephone  —  continued 
travel    saved    by    use    of, 

220,  233,  237    240 
value      of,      to      United 

States,  230,  244 
habit  of  mind  affected  by, 

231,  232 
cost  of,  238,  239 
profits    made    from,    240, 

241,  275 
number  of  employees  of, 

267 

consolidation  of,  with  tele- 
graph, 276,  281-283 
future  of,  276-280,  284- 
289,  292,  295,  297,  298 
the  acme  of  electrical  mar- 
vels, 296 

mechanism  of,  296,  297 
in  art,  298 
Telephonese,  167 
"  Telephonia,"  property  and 

population  of,  196-198 
Telephony,  no  one  individ- 
ual       having        complete 
knowledge  of,  167 
Telephony,  summary  of  pe- 
riods of,  168,  169 
Thayer,  H.  B.,  of  Western 

Electric,  165 
Thomson,   Sir   William,   see 

Kelvin,  Lord 
"  Tichborne    claimants  "    of 

Bell  patents,  78 
Time    element   in   telephone 


calls,  147,  148,  158,  232, 

237,  284, 

Tokio,   telephone  in,   264 
Transatlantic  telephony,  285 
Transmitter,  Berliner's,  118, 

119 
Transmitter,     Blake's,     75, 

120 
Transmitter,    Edison's,    69, 

75,  119 
Transmitter,        Hunnings's, 

120 

Transmitter,  Reis's,  95 
Travel,   effect   of   telephone 

on,  220,  233,  237,  240 
Turkey,  telephone  in,  263 
Tyndall,  quoted,  104 
Tyndall's  interest  in  use  of 

telephone  in  England,  252 


U 


United  Press  and  telephone, 
211 

United  States,  telegrams, 
letters  and  telephone  mes- 
sages of,  268 


Vail,  Theodore  N.,  62-69, 
73,  85,  86,  103,  111,  112, 
128,  130,  135,  136,  167, 
170-173,  175,  194,  195, 
240,  252,  273-277 

"  Vail's  Folly,"  172 


[  314 


INDEX 


Victoria,  Queen,  and  tele- 
phone, 251 

"  Visible  Speech  "  as  taught 
by  Alexander  Graham 
Bell,  15,  19,  20,  25,  34, 

W 

Waiting  list   for  telephones 

in  Tokio,  264 
Waldorf-Astoria   telephones, 

200 
Wall    Street    brokers,    users 

of  telephone,  205 
Wanamaker,  John,  telephone 

orders,  200 
War,    use    of    telephone    in, 

214 
Washington  Star,  The,  and 

telephone,  210 
"  Washington's   Telegraph," 

226 
Watson,  Thomas  A.,  30-33, 

55,  63,  73,  86,   109,  HO, 

112,  114,  121 
Western   Electric   Company, 


110,    111,    145,    159-165, 
271 

Western  Union  Telegraph 
Company,  58-61,  66—70, 
75,  76,  79-85,  88,  89,  101, 

160,  182,  276,  281,  282 
Westinghouse,   how   his    air- 
brake was  received,  44 

Wheatstone,  Sir  Charles,  16, 
18,  106 

White  House  telephone  serv- 
ice, 202,  203 

White,  improver  of  Hun- 
nings's  transmitter,  120 

William,  Kaiser,  and  tele- 
phone, 256 

Williams,  Charles,  30,  53, 
86,  110 

Wire  chiefs,  139,  140 

Wire,    telephone,     135-140, 

161,  162 

Wires,  overhead  and  under- 
ground, 126-135,  150 

Wires,  wrapping  of  under- 
ground, 129-133,  162 


[315] 


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